Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Book Report...

The brutality that slaves endured form their masters and from the institution of slavery caused slaves to be denied their god given rights. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass has the ability to show the psychological battle between the white slave holders and their black slaves, which is shown by Douglass own intellectual struggles against his white slave holders. I will focus my attention on how education allowed Douglass to understand how slavery was wrong, and how the Americans saw the blacks as not equal, and only suitable for slave work. I will also contrast how Douglass view was very similar to that of the women in antebellum America, and the role that Christianity played in his life as a slave and then†¦show more content†¦This is the start of the process that extracts a brute from a child. Throughout the narrative Douglass uses the word brute, to form the image that slaves were nothing more than beasts. This is only one of the numerous examp les in which Douglass creates the image of a dehumanized slave though the use of his vocabulary. Douglass states, I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute! (Douglass 73). Douglass makes it clear to the reader that slavery degrades a man, and makes him loose his manhood. According to Douglass, slavery transformed humans into beasts. Douglass was no longer a man; he was in every essence an animal transformed by the brutality of slavery into a mindless worker. Divine further supports the idea by saying, The plantation was seen as a sort of asylum providing guidance and care for a race that could not look after itself (Divine 237). Slavery as an institution created animals from men; it bleeds the humanity from humans and formed beasts in its wake that need no thing but a comparatively small amount of cultivation to make him an ornament to society and a blessing to his race. By the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beastShow MoreRelatedNarrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Essay1027 Words   |  5 PagesThe Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Book Report The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave was written by Douglass himself, giving a detailed description of the slaveholders cruelty. Douglass was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland, and he makes known that he does not know his specific birthdate, â€Å"... no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it.† (47), but it was approximately around 1818. 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