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Use of Literary Devices in The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass

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Use of Literary Devices in The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass Essay Frederick Douglass has finally managed to run away from one of his masters to become a free slave, but yet he feels fear and paranoia. As he runs away, he contemplates all the possibilities of him getting caught by slaveholders or even turned in by his own kind. And it upsets him having to pass all the houses and food, but he has no shelter and starves with no food. This in fact heightens the intensity of his fear and paranoia because he is more likely to be caught with no where to hide and having no energy to run because he is starving. In The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, he utilizes things such as parallel syntactic structure, paradoxes, figurative language, and caesuras to help portray his feeling of built up unease and terror. Frederick Douglass really takes advantage of parallel syntactic structure to compare his situation of being run away to slaves. Frederick tries to get us to feel empathy in his current condition, while also speaking of the slaves. He says “-wanting shelter and no one to give it-wanting bread, and no money to buy it […]” (Douglass 137). This seems more difficult to live with than having somewhat of shelter and having a bit of food, rather than Douglass having neither. He gets readers to question such things as, would one turn in a man in such need as? Would one understand more if one knew how it was to be in my condition? And this gets people to understand his despair and distress. Douglass uses his paradoxes in a creative way. Where he uses parallel syntactic structure, he also utilizes paradoxes. On page 137, where he says “-wanting shelter and no one to give it-wanting bread, and no money to buy it […]” (Douglass). His use of contradiction is quite effective because it is hard to have all the things you want and need in one’s face, but one can not have it. For example, if a person wanted a new bike and one was just sitting there in their house waiting for them to take it, but their father was
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