15). When describing his holding pen in Washington, DC, Northup described its location with painstaking accuracy, remarking that it was necessary, "in order to present a full and truthful statement…and to portray the institution of Slavery as I have seen and known it, to speak of well-known places" (Northup, p. 22).
Northup's careful construction of an impartial voice does not mean that his narrative is devoid of emotionality and even, on occasion, harsh judgment. He was not above calling some of those responsible for his agony "the incarnate devil" (p. 20) or a "coarse, heartless brute" (p. 102). His irony could sometimes be biting, as when he described a slave trader as "the very amiable, pious-hearted Mr. Theophilus Freeman," all the while recounting Mr. Freeman's brutal treatment of the slaves in his care (p. 35). And his descriptions of the bloody treatment of himself and others at the hands of traders and masters are often chilling and heart-wrenching.
These highly charged and often damning passages are balanced, however, by the generous praise given by Northup to those white men, even former masters, who showed kindness to him and other slaves. In his account of his time at the Great Pine Woods in Louisiana, Northup praised his master's character: "[I]t is but...
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" (Fort, 1) To an extent, freedom could not be experienced until it was understood. And yet, the utopian multiracialism that we might like to attribute to the post Civil War era would hardly be accurate. Instead, the period of Reconstruction bred hardship for the nation, for the South and especially for freed slaves. As Fountain Hughes tells in his narrative, "we had no home, you know. We was jus' turned
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slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where antediluvian pseudo-science had deemed them to be mere animals. These works, although they provide
Not only does he capture the essence of India, he gives the reader an idea of the people, their food, and their culture, all together. In this, the language of his work is like a travelogue, and so, it combines many diverse types of literature into one compact and yet compelling whole. Equiano fills the book with descriptive language like this, and powerful language, too. In conclusion, this slave narrative is
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