Frederick Douglass Ethos

For hundreds of years, slaves in America were separated from their families to be sold off like livestock to their slave owners, then forced to work and live in unimaginable conditions, and viciously beaten for something as little as a task not fully being met. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by the self-taught, abolitionist himself, Douglass shares some light on the inhumane treatment and hardships slaves were forced to overcome in his journey to free himself both mentally and physically from slavery. Douglass appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos in order to truly open his reader's eyes to the horrors of slavery, conveying his message that slavery must be abolished.

Slavery is a topic very capable of putting an emotional weight on a person. This is even more so for those that have actually experienced it first-hand. Frederick Douglass, one of the more influential African-Americans in history, himself, was once a slave. He experienced everything that comes with being a slave in first-person. All the wickedness, hardships, and mental and physical damage, that came with being a slave, were experienced by him. Frederick is able to experience freedom after taking the step himself and escaping slavery. After what is almost an entire life of slavery, one would expect him to have many thoughts floating in his mind about his new found freedom. In the passage from the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass use figures of speech and syntax, and repetition of key phrases to convey his feelings of excitement, insecurity, and loneliness from escaping slavery and arriving in New York in 1838.

In addition, he tries to express to the reader how exactly the slaves suffered from troubles and heartache. "The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe." (Douglass 321), the vivid imagery allows the reader to imagine what the sight of this whipping looked and sounded like. In the same way, slaves were people too and that is what Douglass wanted the readers to see. While arguing his beliefs, Douglass wanted to grab the reader's attention in a way that would make it more appealing; in addition, he wanted to reach the readers human emotions.

In the pre-civil war era, slaves did not obtain any human rights so slave owners treated them in any manner they wanted, which often consisted of cruelty. Douglass uses this cruel simile to compare the escape from landowners to one from an inhumane animal. Further allowing for a visual interpretation that arose when these slaves escaped. Douglas uses creepy imagery to allow for the acknowledgement that slaves encountered and provoke the type of fear they faced upon the audience. In using both imagery and similes, Douglass grants the individuals a visualization of the risks these slaves took when they escaped to obtain their freedom, as well as creating remorse for the fear and cruel treating provoked.

Douglass experienced the worst of slavery. Pathos is used in this paragraph to feel sympathetic for the life he has endured.

Frederick Douglass appeals to the senses of logos and pathos in The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass to convince his audience that people who were a partook slavery in his time period weren’t bad people. He claims that slavery itself is the problem, and no one is safe from its powers of corruption. His appeal to logos leads to his argument being much harder to rebut since he backs it up with real examples from his life, while his appeal to pathos is used to make the argument more personal and provocative since it gives Douglass and his audience some common ground.

Slavery and discrimination have been apart of America’s history for a very long time. It is something people have fought for and something that remains a vital part of how this country came to be. Many articles have been written by former slaves about their experiences throughout their struggle to obtain their freedom. One of these is Resurrection by Frederick Douglass. This autobiography uses pathos, imagery, and diction, in order to effectively explain the challenges African Americans faced while living as a slave.

This aspect is not so much for the reader but for Douglass and slaves to release all the things they have been through and what slave are subjected to in that era. Even though this country stands for freedom and liberty slaves are imprisoned and chained like animals or properties. As well as having the knowledge of an animal as said by Douglass “By far the larger part of the slave know little of their ages as horses knows of theirs”. He this is one of his many angers and distastes of how slaves are denied any rights to knowledge. Even more having deepening quotes of groups of slaves having the emotion that stayed in Douglass’s heart and mind forever “ they were tones loud, long, and deep;they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish”.

In his harsh, angry speech, Frederick Douglass mocks the audience in a fight against slavery. He makes considerably accurate and biting arguments towards those who regard slavery as an outstanding example of American freedom. “There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.” He modifies his statements through rhetorical strategies including tone, ethos, and pathos and creates a magnificently harsh speech worthy of fame.

Frederick Douglass weaves powerful and effective syntax throughout his narrative to show the way slavery can impact someone’s mental and emotional being. Firstly, Douglass employs rhetorical questions in order to reveal his inner turmoil. In asking the questions, “Is there any God? Why am I a slave?” Douglass allows the reader to see how at the time, he was at his breaking point and at a desperate period in his life. He begged to know the answer to these questions because he didn’t understand why he was suffering while others were thriving. By allowing the reader to peer into Douglass’s mental state, the reader can understand the wave of emotions he underwent due to the nature of slavery; it can be inferred that it greatly changes a person,

On page 56, Douglass exclaims,“‘You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip!’”(56). In his cry to the white sails, Douglass highlights the real horrors of slavery by using metaphorical comparisons. He uses kind and joyful words like “merrily” and “gentle gale” to describe the freely moving sails but dark and gloomy words like “sadly” and “bloody whip” to describe himself and his life. This dichotomy is an effective way in which Douglass may have changed the view of slavery in the minds of his readers.

Douglass illustrates throughout his novel the dehumanizing effects that slavery has on its primary victims through the restriction of their human expression, bestowing upon them animal-like qualities, and creating an aversion to freedom. Additionally, not only were slaves transformed into brutes, their owners were transformed into cruel beasts through the application of double standards and the corruption of their innocence. However, Douglass’s work humanizes the enslaved population by demonstrating his ability to utilize meaningful and artistic prose through his usage of constructive parallel structure, tangible personification, expressive symbolism, and tactful diction.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, is a stunning and horrifying autobiography in which Frederick Douglass himself uses a wide array of rhetoric in his writing to portray how slavery not only destroys the human soul, but also degrades and dehumanizes both slaves and slaveholders alike. Slavery is “the keeping of slaves as a practice or institution.” To dehumanize is to “deprive of human qualities or attributes; divest of individuality.” Douglass’ argument is that both slaves and slaveholders are deprived of human qualities and attributes due to the effect that slavery has on them. Through rhetorical strategies such as appeals to ethos and pathos, parallelism, repetition, and imagery, Douglass persuasively instills his ideas in the reader in order to convey his argument.

The Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass shows Douglass’ first hand experience with slavery. With his story, he debunks the mythology of slavery. He does this by rebuking the romantic image of slavery, showing how the belief that African Americans has an inferior intellect is incorrect, and showing the disloyalty the system promoted in slaves.

Douglass initially describes his joy and gratitude of his freedom from slavery, but he goes on to write of the challenges that freedom brought him as well. Upon his freedom from slavery, Douglass was joyous—he had removed himself from the dehumanizing environment that slavery had created for him. However, Douglass quickly realized that freedom and the “real world” included challenges that he had yet to expect. Douglass’s linguistic style contributes to his expression of his complex feelings towards freedom from slavery.