Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass

In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass explains his life in slavery and the things he experienced. Frederick Douglass was an African American born into slavery. After birth Douglass was separated from his mother that he knew a little about, and did not know who his father was, but as a typically slave he suspected his father to be a white man. Douglass writes this narrative to tell his life story and to show what slaves actually experienced physically, mentally, and emotionally. Douglass didn’t have a chance to experience a normal childhood, instead his childhood consist of work. His work wasn’t as hard because he was so young, but over the years as he grew older his work became longer and harder. As a child Douglass witnessed his family members get beaten. He has seen things in life that a child should never have to see. Douglass gave us a view of what slavery was really like. He opens our eyes to tell us about his struggling of trying to free himself.
Douglass hated having masters, he wanted to be his own master. He was a slave that feared that he would be in slavery his whole life. This was something Douglass refuse to let happen, he knew that one day he would experience freedom by saying “This was what I wanted. I talked to them of our want of manhood, if we submitted to our enslavement without at least one noble effort to be free.” (pg.96) He wanted to be free to experience manhood, to experience life. He had never got a chance to even experience his own life, because he was abducted into slavery after birth. Douglass was a slave that wanted to be free, because he wanted an education. So because he was not a free man he begin to learn how to read and write, which was bad for a slave to know but because Douglass learned how to it gave him more of an urge to want to be free. It was important for slaves to remain uneducated, because if they weren’t then they would understand that their masters treated them badly so they wouldn’t respect