Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave provides a well-informed and vivid interpretation of horrors of slavery. In describing his life, from his birth in Talbot County, Maryland to his arrival in New York City, Frederick Douglass spends the majority of his narrative (Chapters I – IX specifically) moving from different plantations to homes and slowly learning to read and write, always at the risk of facing beatings from his master. It is into the later chapters where his knowledge of the inhumane system that is slavery grows exponentially, leading to his eventual freedom.

Again, as a narrative, Douglass’ graphic descriptions and strenuous life story provide a significant outlook into the past. However, his analysis of the systematics of slavery gives the reader a way to empathize; to truly understand the cruelty of these slave owners/masters and their revolting methods. Similar to the way slaves were entirely deprived of an education, slaveholders would employ tactics to trick their servants. Douglass describes the effect of receiving holidays as a slave: “The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud… This will be seen by the fact, that the slaveholders like to have their slaves spend those days just in such a manner as to make them as glad of their ending as of their beginning. Their object seems to be, to disgust their slaves with freedom, by plunging them into the lowest depths of dissipation” (269-70).  This practice is one of several Douglass observed which slaveholders would “disgust their slaves with freedom”, rather make it known that the slave will forever remain a slave. It is but a way of life.

In his career of slavery, it is certainly the physical treatment that pushed Fredrick Douglass over the edge: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered upon my eye died” (264). Yet despite all the hardships throughout his life he successfully stands above the inhumanity of the system in the triumphant stance as a “Liberator.”