Question

GIVING ALL THE POINTS I CAN!!

One of the central ideas of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is that, in the
minds of slave owners, an enslaved person is no better than an animal. In a well-
developed response of one paragraph, describe how Douglass develops and supports
this central idea, citing specific evidence from the text and exploring how Douglass
makes connections between key events and the central idea in your response.

Answer 1

In the Narrative, Douglass shows slaveholding to be damaging not only to the slaves themselves, but to slave owners as well. The corrupt and irresponsible power that slave owners enjoy over their slaves has a detrimental effect on the slave owners' own moral health.

Step-by-step explanation:

He thinks that if he were an animal, he wouldn’t have the ability to think and worry about his circumstances. Now that he can read, Douglass is tormented by his constant thoughts about his life as a slave and the impossibility of freedom. He regards slaveholders as “a band of successful robbers” and as “the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. Douglass’s purpose is to express his thoughts and feelings about being enslaved and about the effects of literacy. He relates three events that help him achieve his goal: his mistress teaching him to read, his further pursuit of instruction from “all the little white boys,” and the acquisition of certain reading materials that encouraged his own thoughts and feelings about slavery.