Sejour simply wished to use the details of his life to tell a wrenching story of the truth of American slavery to a foreign audience. "Le Mulatre" is not simply significant because it is oldest known work of fiction by an African-American writer, but because of the author's evident desire to tell a entertaining and truthful tale, rather than to provide a witness of truth designed to persuade the reader. .

             Sejour wished to prove himself as an author, not simply show that slavery's horrors were a reality to unaware Americans as did Douglass. This is why Sejour makes use of fictional techniques, such as foreshadowing, graphic descriptions, and paints pictures in images rather than tries to underline the truth of what he is saying with substantive facts, or respond to his critics, as does Douglass throughout his autobiography. Sejour's tale does not chronicle the whole of the sad plight of slaves, inter dispersing other narratives throughout that of the main tale (again, as did Douglass) so much as it makes use of one plot inspired by slavery to allow the aspiring artist create a work that has a opening, a period of suspence, a climax, and then a resolution.

             Unlike Sejour's short story, Frederick Douglass' later Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, does not leave the reader in the dark about how the tale will end. From the beginning, Douglass informs his reader that Douglass did earn his freedom, and did eventually learn to read, despite evident obstacles placed in the narrator's way. Douglass may create some suspense in the reader's mind in regards to how these feats were accomplished, but the point of his autobiography was not to stir up sensational interest in a horrific story, but to create a sense of pathos, or pity between his own human perspective and the assumed humanity of the reader. Douglass stresses the goodness of his young mother, how he yearned for freedom even during the brief periods of slavery that were not harsh and cruel, and how he struggled to gain the literacy that enabled him to write his own truthful narration.