Frederick Douglass Rhetorical Techniques

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The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass depicts the humiliating scenes of dehumanization of slaves. However, throughout the text using knowledge, he shows the readers the road from slavery to freedom. Therefore, Douglass utilizes several rhetorical devices such as simile, repetition and parallelism to convey his attitude about The
American Promise.
In the beginning of the text, Douglass uses simile to dehumanize slaves by comparing them to horses. He adopts an serious and depressing tone in order to tell the reader the slave’s lack of knowledge. Douglass appeals to the reader by emphasizing how the slave masters treats the slaves as farm animals. As an example, “Larger part of the slaves know as little of their …show more content…
In addition, Douglass uses repetition to represent the insults given from masters to the slaves. He appeals to the readers by pinpointing how the masters would also dehumanize the children. For example, “The children were then called, like so many pigs and like so many pigs

they would come and devour the mush.” (30) , which depicts repetition by showing how the masters would make it seem as If they were wild animals who were hungry. In other words,
Douglass’ attitude towards the American Promise was disturbing because as everyone was suppose to be treated the same, slaves on the other hand were being dehumanized by being referred as wild farm animals.
Also, Douglass uses parallelism to tell the readers how slaves were humiliated by the masters. He adopt an sadden tone in order to explain the hatred by master towards the slaves.
Douglass appeals to the readers by if making clear how cruel the masters would be to the slaves.
For instance, “They were frequently whipped when least deserving, and escaped whipping when most deserving it.” (18) , which depicts parallelism by showing how masters would
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