Use Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave to examine identity.
From its first page, The ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas’ is set up as an exploration of Identity; The main purpose of the novel being to establish the truth of Frederick Douglass’s public identity and ‘set [himself] right before the public in the United States’ (Blassingame, 1979, p. 251). In fact, the text was described by Albert Stone as the “first native American autobiography to create a black identity in a style and form adequate to the pressures of historical black experience” (Stone, 1973, p. 213). As Kimberly Drake explains, “Slaves' (or more accurately, ex-slaves') autobiographies record the process in which the ex-slave writes his or her self into an existence recognized by dominant American society. The author portrays the way he or she overcomes the slaveholding society's continuing attempts to eradicate his or her identity; simultaneously, s/he rewrites that identity to fit the dominant culture's norms, despite the fact that these norms tend to conflict with his/her own experiences during and after slavery. These autobiographies thus provide dramatic models of the textual construction and development of "American" identity”. (Drake, 1997)
In essence, Drake argues that Douglass has used his ‘Narrative’ to chronicle the death and consequent rebirth of his identity. The novel uses language, pacing and symbolism to establish Douglass’s sense of identity as well as moving on to cement Douglass’s experiences as the epitome of the “historical black experience” (Stone, 1973). In the first chapter, Douglass paints an image of a systemic breakdown of identity. He shows how slaveholders “keep their slaves ignorant” (Douglass, 2009, p. 15) and how he was deprived of a connection with his mother – this, coupled with use of violence on him and