The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass the...

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An Analysis of the Formation of Identity You have seen how a man was made a slave; you will now see how a slave was made a man. Ââ€"Frederick Douglass The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave details the progression of a slave to a man, and thus, the formation of his identity. The narrative functions as a persuasive essay, written in the hopes that it would successfully lead to hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of [his] brethren in bonds (Douglass 331). As an institution, slavery endeavored to reduce the men, women, and children in bonds to a state less than human. The slave identity, according to the institution of slavery, was not†¦show more content†¦He is also unable to form his identity based on familial relations. Suspecting only that his father was a white man and that it was often whispered that [his] master was [his] father, Douglass was unable to name, let alone have a relationship with, his father (Douglass 255). Furthermore, Douglass writes that he and his mother were separated when he was a baby, and that he was never able to form a relationship with her because he saw her only four or five times (Douglass 256). Finally, he was also lacking a familial relationship with his siblings. He writes that the early separation of [all of them] from [their] mother had well nigh blotted the fact of [their] relationship from [their] memories (Douglass 272). Under slavery, slaves were not given the rights to family that many slaveholders took for granted. Any slave relationship could end at the whim of the master. Every slave family stood the possibility of being sold away from one another and never seeing each other again. Slave women were forbidden from disclosing the identity of a childs father if the father was a white man. If the child was descended from the master, he or she was considered no more human, and no more likely to be spared the trauma of being sold because slaveholders often bought women in childbearing years in order to increase the return on their investment when the children were sold. This created, on the part of Douglass, a lack