To Live or Not to Live?

After reading Frederick Douglas’s narrative, I was left with one main question: until what extent does human nature drive us to survive? Frederick Douglas was living in hell before he escaped north. He “suffered from hunger and cold… was kept almost naked” and “had no bed”. (39) Not only did he live in this inhumane environment, but he was treated as an animal, he was whipped whenever his masters felt like doing so, and most importantly, he was isolated from knowledge. So what was it that kept Douglas wanting to survive? Was it knowledge? But how could it be knowledge, if after each piece of knowledge he obtained, he just realized more and more how horrifying his reality was? What was it that kept him going?

As I was reading Douglas’s narrative I tried to pretend as if I were him. I thought that I couldn’t ever resist the pain of one whip, or of hunger, and cold, but I think that there is something inside of us that makes us stronger. It’s a kind of us that we didn’t know it existed, until we reach the circumstances that this other us is unleashed. I cannot conclude that what I am saying is true: that human kind will always fight to survive, but I do believe that for one to give up on life is very rare, and Douglas does a great job in demonstrating so.

Thankfully, I have never been in the position of Douglas, but I do know people close to me that have experienced very hard and inhumane situations that sometimes they could have wondered if living was worth it or not. Unfortunately, one of my mother’s best friends was kidnapped in 2000 by the FARC for two years. She says that sometimes these men would treat her very badly, although she wouldn’t suffer from hunger like Douglas did, she was sometimes forced to sleep in cages so that the men would make fun of her, or they would get snakes and put them on her while she was sleeping. Although Douglas’s and Luisa’s situation are very different they do share one very important thing: both of them didn’t have freedom. They were prisoners.

Luisa told me that one time the FARC told her that she was finally going to be set free because her family had paid. She had to walk for about 15 hours and when she got to the supposed place where her family were supposedly waiting for her, there were a bunch of FARC men just making fun of her because she had fallen for their prank. At that moment Luisa wanted to die, but there was something inside of her that told her to keep on going. Although she suffered so much, everyday for two years she had hope inside of her that one day she would be set free. And I believe that that is what happened to Douglas. He had hope that his reality was going to change, and because he believed it so deeply, his reality did change. It doesn’t matter how bad our situation is, there is always that little spark inside of us saying that everything is going to be okay, and we want to live to see when it will be okay. It is hope that keeps us and kept Douglas and Luisa going. But then again, if these two people who lived terrible lives wanted to keep on going, until what extent do we have to arrive to, to want to die?

The Power of Curiosity

While I was reading the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, I realized that Douglass and I have something in common which is curiosity. Reading chapters five through seven made me realized that Douglass was able to read out of his desire to know the unknown.

I can infer that since Douglas was little he would see people staring attentively at a piece of paper, not knowing why they did that, which made him question what it was. That got him into questioning what it was that they were doing, thus this curiosity started motivating him to learn to look at a piece of paper attentively and gain some sort of information. This is what drove Douglass to read. This reminds me of when I was around nine years old, which is the age where I started to question everything that my parents were talking about or certain things that they did. Now they couldn’t start whispering and giving weird looks while I was around because they knew that my curiosity of the unknown would drive me to finding out just like Douglass. Curiosity drove me crazy, whenever I entered my parent’s bedroom and they quickly changed the channel made me question, why did they do this? What was so terrible or inappropriate that I couldn’t know about? So that’s what made me go to another room, put on the channel that they were on and watch what they were watching. This was all do to my curiosity just like Douglas, wanting to learn how to write.

When Douglass was a slave it was “prohibited” to teach a slave how to read and write because it was “unlawful, and unsafe”. When Douglass heard these words it made him desire even more to learn how to read and write. This was the same as when my mother told my father that I couldn’t watch “Friends” of the “OC”. I would hide like Douglass in a separate room, watch these types of shows, just as he read the newspaper. Reading the newspaper, and watching “Friends” gave both of us the chance to see the unknown parts of life that society was hiding from us. My parents wanted to protect me, from the “inappropriate” things that the world had, whereas the Whites took these measure to protect themselves from the Slaves. Maybe my parents did this also to protect themselves, so I wouldn’t try to imitate all the “inappropriate” things that the cast of “Friends” or the “OC” did, especially for a nine year old.

Douglass says that “the more he read, the more he was lead to anohr and detest his enslavers”.  That sometimes he felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing” and that “in moments of agony he envied his fellow classmates for their stupidity.” (51) Sometimes it was best to be ignorant so he didn’t have to worry about what his masters were doing, or how they were violating the slaves’ human rights. This is like when top-secret information from the government is released and we know things that we weren’t meant to know. A hypothetical example would be if the United States government knew that aliens were in the world and no one else was supposed to know because people would panic and the world would turn out to be a disaster. Douglass felt that sometimes it would be nice not to know everything because this generates frustration, just like I have also felt that it would be nice to not know how real life works and pretend that everything is sunny, but just like Douglass the curiosity beats the desire of wanting to feel comfortable with reality. Is it sometimes better to be ignorant?

Its All about Emotion

After reading chapters three and four of a "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas an American Slave" I realized that Douglas uses a lot of ethos and pathos and not much logos. Since this is a memoir, and it touches the horrific subject of slavery, he does not have to put much logic into it because what he wants us to know is how he felt while he was living this nightmare. It’s all about sentiment and imagining what was going on. 

Douglas uses ethos throughout the whole memoir. From the beginning, even before one starts reading, ethos is already present. The words slave and slaveholder, or black and white at that time already had a meaning, sort of character in society, and that is what ethos is. Unfortunately, at the time whites had an ethos of superiority towards blacks, a sort of power. Colored people were seen more as animals than human beings, and they were oppressed by society. This is seen throughout the whole book, but especially at times when Douglas starts describing for instance, the personality of a white man towards the slaves. For example, how “Mr. Gore spoke to command and commanded to be obeyed… When he whipped he seemed to do so from a sense of duty, and feared no consequences… He was a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like coolness. His savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge. (35) With that description of Mr. Grose’s character, the reader can picture how cruel and inhumane this man was towards the slaves, and how terrified the slaves must of felt with his presence. Or how Colonel Loyd was “known to own thousands of slaves” which makes the reader picture how white men were rich whereas the slaves had nothing. The feelings that both races had towards each other were all about ethos because those feelings were the reactions that they had towards their presence.

When someone is talking about slavery, normally a person's reaction is all about pathos, nothing else comes to mind. It was an event in history that is heart breaking and savage. It makes me feel sad and sick at the same time, there isn't much logic into it, it's all emotion. For instance when Douglas is talking about how “Mrs. Hicks… seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl’s nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life.” (37) Douglas wrote about this event so that the reader has a horrific perception of Mrs. Hicks, and the savage treatment that slaves received for just doing minor things like falling asleep. Douglas made it clear that white men and women were inhumane against colored people. With this passage Douglas accomplishes his goal of making the reader very sensible towards the slaves, and mad against the slaveholders.

Douglas uses a mixture of pathos and logos throughout the book. The examples stated above contain both of these rhetorical characteristics, and Douglas does this on purpose to make his memories come alive in our minds. So that we can picture and feel somewhat what he felt while he lived through this misery. After reading these two chapters, due to Douglas’s powerful descriptions I feel down with water in my eyes.