The Narrative of the Life of
racial identity, especially its roots and development, was central to his life and thought. His family, extended family, religious beliefs, and “education” as a slave and free man helped to shape his aspirations as well as his search for identity. As a Negro and a mulatto, in a white racist society, his responses to the omnipresent issue of race were complex and revealing. These responses revealed deep-seated attitudes that reflected not only how he felt about blacks and whites, but also, most important, how he felt about himself. Indeed, it is impossible to understand Douglass without understanding his intricate racial world view. An undercurrent of racial ambivalence, symbolized by his mulatto identity, complicated this racial teleology. Douglass’s expanding racial awareness demonstrated an increasingly sophisticated perception of self-identity, collective identity, and their mutual dependence. Clearly, the essential aim of his life was to resolve the problem of race.
The book entitled “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” was an autobiography about the life experienced and encountered by the author. This narratives has shown how white slaveholders disseminate slavery be keeping their slaves uninformed and ignorant. During Douglass time, many individuals believed that slavery was a natural state of a human being. A black people, they thought that they were inherently not capable of participating in different civil society and thus should be kept forever as workers for white people.
In this narrative, Frederic Douglass has used the middle class ideals for domesticity because he thinks that it is the best way at that time to show his condemnation about slavery and racism. In this, Douglass has been able to utilise the foundational republican ideologies of human freedom and equality and criticise the cruel contradiction and hypocrisies in the culture of America.
In addition, he used the ideals of middle-class to show the needs for changes in terms of treating black people. He used the middle class ideas to show his resistance towards people who makes the life of black people suffered. The narrative also discusses the strategies and procedures implemented by white people to gain and keep the power over blacks.
In this narrative, the author portrays the slavery’s ability to degrade human through his insights into the mentality and outlook of the slave owners. He suggested that if the slaves are created rather than born, these notions may be true for slave owners. From the start of the Narrative, the authors has discusses in details the physical cruelties inflicted on slaves. In the Narrative, he has been able to provide details on the reasons why he was enlightened to make the slaves go against slavery and fight for their freedom.
The narrative shows how he pursues social reforms to achieve his goal of abolition of slavery. The tradition of black social reform paralleled and dovetailed that of white social reform. The conflict between black social progress and white racism perpetuated and sometimes widened the gulf between the two traditions. Douglass’s philosophy and pursuit of social reform drew upon both traditions attempting, in the process, to overcome the differences between them and to unite them. Racism remained the chief impediment to such attempted unions. Both the black social reform cause and the social reform cause in general needed progressive white allies not to promote racism, but to struggle against it. Notwithstanding the utility of alliances with progressive white colleagues, black social reformers, like their people, understood that black uplift would depend primarily upon black effort. As a social reformer and a black leader, Douglass fully immersed himself not only in the black liberation struggle, but also in the related struggle to alleviate the tension between social reform and racism.
Douglass, thus, consistently mounted a blistering assault on the negative impact of racism on social reform. Speaking throughout Great Britain between 1845 and 1847, he delivered many such attacks against racism as a barrier to interracial social reform movements. In several temperance addresses, he carefully detailed how a group of black Philadelphians committed to temperance, yet barred from joining white societies, had organized their own. Blacks in other northern areas had done likewise largely for the same reason. This discrimination, nevertheless, did not diminish their commitment to temperance. Douglass argued that in temperance they saw “a moral and virtuous eminence, from which they would be enabled to look down upon those who were binding them with chains and fetters
Frederick Douglass is the one commanding historic character of the collared race in America. He is the model of emulation of those who are struggling up through the trials and difficulties which he himself suffered and subdued. He is illustrative and exemplary of what they might become — the first fruit of promise of a dormant race. To the aspiring collared youth of this land Mr. Douglass is, at once, the inspiration of their hopes and the justification of their claims.” While one may reasonably argue, especially today, with Miller’s claim of Douglass’s singular historical eminence, his claim for Douglass’s prototypical heroic and symbolic pre-eminence is more cogent. Perhaps better than any other nineteenth-century black American, Douglass personified the travail and triumph of his people. A heroic and symbolic view of Douglass continues to be meaningful because his life struggle so vividly represented his people’s struggle.
Through the narrative, he has been able to show how a slave like him can make changes in the society and open the minds of other people to stop mistreating people just because of their colours and races. His narration, has enlightened many people to fight for what they think is right and to do things that will change their lives.
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