Imagery in Frederick Douglass

A detailed Summary of Imagery in Frederick Douglass

Imagery in Frederick Douglass's Narrative

Reading about the pains of Frederick Douglass's life as a slave is hard on the hearts of readers. Tales of rape, brutality, human degradation, and identity restriction, are horrific in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, and are all part of this detailed description of the immoral system of slavery. Douglass uses imagery in this story of his quest for freedom, to depict in our minds and hearts these cruel and ungodly wrongs of slavery.

One of the accounts that Douglass first introduces is the lack of his mother in his life. He did know his mother but, due to the restrictions of slavery, was taken from her. He says, "I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life," and he goes on to describe how she only came to him at night, but was gone before he woke. The imagery that Douglass uses when describing the occurrence of his mother's death, depicts the isolation that he experienced,

"I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I

Douglass uses imagery again when explaining about the final days of another family member, his beloved grandmother. She is made to live in a hut in the woods, by herself. Here, loneliness and death constitute the tone projected by his words:

"There were no beds given the slaves, unless one coarse blanket be considered such." (700) Slaves-human beings-were reduced to sleeping in a pile on the floor in the cold or the hot, half naked. What comes to my mind are images of tools that a person would buy for farming, and at the end of the day when he was done in the field he would just throw them on the floor in the tool shed until the next morning when he needed them again;

Mr. Gore, aptly named, was described by Douglass very vividly, "His presence was painful; his eye flashed confusion; and seldom was his sharp, shrill voice heard, without producing horror and trembling in their ranks." One incident that Frederick used to depict sheer brutality and heartlessness among slaveholders was the story of Mr. Gore and Demby, a slave. Demby was being whipped by Gore when, "to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek and stood there, refusing to come out." Gore told Demby that he would give him to the count of three, so to speak, and then he would shoot him. After his third call "without consultation or deliberation...Mr. Gore raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood." (706) This image is certainly disturbing, and fuels the anger toward slaveholders. The brutal depiction of slavery does not stop at that. The words used to describe what happened to a fifteen year old girl when she did not hear her master's baby cry, due to lack of sleep, are deeply troubling. "Mrs. Hicks, finding the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized and oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and proceeded upon mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick so that the poor girl expire

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Approximate Word count = 1427
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English