1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
2. What does he mean, on p.238, when he describes the first whipping he witnessed as, “the blood-stained gate”?
3. What have you learned from reading this narrative that you didn’t already know about slavery in America?
4. Explain the significance of literacy for Douglass?
5. How does Douglass feel about Southern Christianity? Why?
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1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
The significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life is it describes how knowledge was a crime. The slaves were not allow to even know their birthday, the less they knew the less better it was for white people. I guess they were forced to stay ignorants and uneducated because the white master feared a rebellion and the lost of their workers. Also, Douglass narrates how he was separated from his mother in a really young age, which was something normal in that time, and the probability that his white master could have been his father. But, in those cases where the father was white the child inherited the mother’s occupation.
What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
The information that Douglass provides of his early years depicts how slaves were to stay in the dark or lack knowledge. Slaves were so insignificant that they weren’t allowed to know their birth date. Douglass states that he never met a slave that knew his/her birthday as well as how not knowing when he was born caused unhappiness. This just proves that white people wanted and succeeded in reducing the worth and humanity of slaves.
4. Explain the significance of literacy for Douglass?
Literacy was very significant for Douglass because it made him aware about the system of slavery and how slaves were purposefully deprived from education so that they would not be able to protest due to their ignorance of the world. As soon as Douglass learns how to read, he desires to become more and more literate yet this also comes with a cost,“I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition,”(254)In this quote, Douglass believes that although he is lucky to know how to read, the knowledge he obtains from reading makes him depressed about his own life. He learns that unlike white children who grow up and have freedom, he will be a slave for life. Through literacy Douglass begins to raise questions about why this is so, and what makes white people so significantly different that they are treated as superior meanwhile slaves are inferior. This means that through literacy, he was able to obtain answers that people around him would never provide because of the fear that if slaves get these answers, they will eventually become free.
5. How does Douglass feel about Southern Christianity? Why?
In the appendix of his slave narrative, Frederick Douglass expresses his dislike for Christianity in the United States. He does not despise the Christian religion but rather how it’s practiced in the United States by white slaveowners who use it to justify slavery. In page 289, Douglass quotes “I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land”. He considers it hypocritical in that the actions of slaveowners who he worked under contradict values such as the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sins. An example of this is the sin that is wrath. Douglass’s previous owners Mr. Covey and Colonel Lloyd would often use whippings against him and other slaves usually out of anger while claiming to be pious. At the end of the narrative, Douglass rants about Southern Christianity because he feels that southern slaveowners use a religion to justify enslaving an entire race while tarnishing the values and teachings of that religion at the same time.
Q) Explain the significance of literacy for Douglass?
Literacy had great significance for Fredrick Douglass. At first he was just eager to read and write and had fallen in love with it. However, it was after his master stopped him from learning that he wanted to do it even more. He knew that since it was something that his master didn’t wanted him to do, it must somehow be good for him. This intensified his desire to learn. As he started reading more and more he discovered that it, his haterd towards his master and syestem of slavery increased. That is because with reading he discovered the truth behind slavery, and how it offered him a way out off slavery. He read this book in which a slave gets free by his wit and knowledge. This to him was something he had never seen before and this gave him hope. literacy to Fredrick was hope.
4. Explain the significance of literacy for Douglass?
Since Douglas was a slave, literacy was looked down upon and forbidden. The fact that he wasn’t supposed to read and right only made him want to learn it more. This was significant to him because at one point he realized he didn’t want to be a slave for the rest of his life. Literacy was his way of “escaping” slavery. He was also able to understand why slavery is what is it, and question it. He got answers that slave owners didn’t want him to have.
1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
Through reading Douglass’s early years of his life, we could know that slaves don’t live like a human being. They don’t even know who their parents are. They have been deprived of celebrating their birthdays. They are not allowed to publicly see their moms and even not go to their mom’s funeral. In the text, Douglass describes that by not knowing much about her mother, he has no feeling for her when she dies. All these things are normal to them and they don’t feel weird. They have to be dehumanized.
The significance of the information that Douglass provides about the early years of his life is that Douglass want us to know that slaves have no power which means no human right. And the reason why I think that Slaves have very harsh and miserable life because Douglass said that he don’t even know his birth date and he also don’t even know about his parents and where they live. It means that he did not get the love of his parents in his entire life.
3. What have you learned from reading this narrative that you didn’t already know about slavery in America?
One of the things that I have learned about slavery in America that I didn’t already know is their precise treatment in the North and South. In high school, the information about slavery in America brought in more general and simplified way. Whereas, southerners were generally loved the idea about having slaves thus usually treated them firmly by forcing them to work all day long, and northerners being fairly good towards African-Americans and treated them as equals. However, after reading this slave-narrative, I learned that the conditions were much worse to the point where slaves were dehumanized and treated worse than livestock. Moreover, the pre-civil war relationship between both North and South were much more severe that I have ever imagined and was inevitable. In school, they usually teach about the Civil War that started with a bombardment at Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay, but they never mention anything regarding why the war might have broken up in the first place other than that it based upon ending slavery. In other words, they never suggest how differently and crucially Confederates were dehumanizing slaves and how the slaves honestly felt about life in the south and north.
1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
The significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life is that he grew up without knowing his age, parents. He wants us to know that he was treated like slaves. He wants to show that during that time slaves have no rights and they were treated like animals. This made him to become writer so that he save other people and people can raise thier voice against them.
1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
While writing “The narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave” Frederick Douglass makes the choice to include information about his early days of his life as a slave. This information proves to be significant as it sheds a light on how American slave owners chose to dehumanize their slaves by making it a crime for slaves to posses any form of knowledge that is outside of knowledge on how to preform their assigned tasks. The slaves were not allowed to read, write or even know their birthday as the less the slaves knew, the less better it was for slave owners.
For Douglass, literacy means freedom, or at least, a means to reaching freedom. Douglass’ actions and core values are of a constructive nature, therefore he was destined to do well, for a an who is true and honest to himself and the world around him, will never find failure. Through literacy, Douglass can finally have an outlet through which his character, thoughts, intentions, understanding of life events and morality could finally be expressed to a wider audience than just himself. Through literacy Douglass was able to reinforce the shape of his destiny until that finally led to his liberation.
What have you learned from reading this narrative that you didn’t already know about slavery in America?
After reading this narrative, I learned a few new things that I never knew. One would be the idea that slavery in the South was drastically worse than the North. I knew that even though the North eventually apposed slavery and fought for the abolition, that a life of a slave in the North was considerably better. The fact that Fredrick was able to work and was able to get money was shocking an unheard off. Although his owner was taking most of his hard earned cash, I never knew that slaves were given that opportunity. I thought slave-owners, in the North and South, used slaves to do unlimited and unpaid work until their deaths.
1. What is the significance of the information Douglass provides about the early years of his life?
Douglass’ early life was the complete opposite for almost all slaves. He was given the opportunity to be literate and have an education, which almost all other slaves did not have. This was significant because being literate was also a social aspect, a slave being able to receive such an education was abnormal and can lead to a slave learning the truth behind all of slavery, which the educated people were hiding and abusing.