Douglass earns an affective response from his readers, even if he doesn’t have to fight for it. Readers would readily feel sympathy for a person in his position, but only from a distant perspective. Here, we feel not for former slave, but for Frederick Douglas.
He does this by showing us who he is. The chapter does not start with great, devastating emotion. He instead starts off with his mistress, thus delaying what, (or who) the chapter is really about. He’s patient, and so are his sentences.
The suspension is first off grammatical- sentences are formed with long, slow clauses that transmit a calm, controlled voice. Douglas does not shift from this sentence structure, even when things get more emotional. We’ve seen stylists show emotion through changes in sentence length- long when they’re calm, short and snappy when conveying anger. That’s not the case here:
“I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed. While in this state of mind, I was eager to hear any one speak of slavery.”
Douglass shows passion without loosing himself. He’s the same one in moments of great desperation as he is when he’s introducing the subject- he’s though a great deal about his situation (profoundly since at leas the age of 12, as he tells us) so there’s no burst here. It’s not about self-discovery or a live breakthrough, it’s an explanation, which is why he makes use of metaphors:
“It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out.”
The self-reflection came long before these words made the page.
When I say that Douglass is in control, I mean he’s scholarly, not robotic.
His diction is almost religious, making his sentences resonate. He uses words like evil, behold, wretched and soul. Powerful emotion is evoked, but only after we meet Douglass as a person and not as an example. By the time the chapter elevates to its more passionate moments, we already know that this is a cerebral, controlled man that can reflect on the world and the people that surround him (his mistress), a man that can explain his own feelings about being a slave without being the overly emotional voice we’d expect.
Suppression of the individual is what slavery is all about, so even if a generic retelling of the horrors of the time period would suffice to achieve empathy from the reader, Douglas must achieve individuality on the page, which in the larger scale proves more powerful than his metaphors.
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