Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass once said, “I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.” Frederick Douglass author and protagonist of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass was a slave that suffered over twenty years of physical abuse, deprivation, and starvation under the rusty, blood crusted chains of slavery. Frederick Douglass is a former American slave who taught himself to be a brilliant writer and orator who sparked the abolitionist movement. He writes about his former life, in which he had suffered through years of starvation, dehydration, and deprivation of the basic necessities of life. However, because of those years of suffering, Douglass was able to be one of the few slaves that revealed the ugly truth behind slavery. Douglass shows the audience through the use of literary devices that ignorance is a tool of slavery and knowledge is the path to freedom. Frederick Douglass writes using litotes, antithesis, and chiasmus to explain the use of ignorance as a fetter and the suppression of knowledge to conceal the path to freedom.
Frederick Douglass emphasizes the use of ignorance to prevent slaves from obtaining knowledge about freedom and slavery through the use of litotes. After Frederick Douglass reads through “The Colombian Orator,” he realizes the truth about ignorance, freedom, and knowledge. Douglass writes, “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me. There was no getting rid of it. […] The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever” (Douglass 24). Douglass realizes that freedom was within his reach and nothing could make the overwhelming urge to reach out and grab freedom disappear from the depths of his mind. Litotes are words that negate their opposite, similar to being lost in a maze. A path that can be created as a simple, straight line, is warped into a complex creation of passages that merge and intertwine with one