How many chapters are in the narrative of the life of frederick douglass

Advertisement - Guide continues below

Previous Next

Chapter 1

• Autobiographies tend to start with the details of your birth, the names of your parents, and that sort of thing. The trouble is that Douglass was born a slave, so he doesn't have much to work with. He doesn't know his parents or his birthday.
• He's heard that his father was a white man, perhaps even his master, but he has no way of finding out for sure. He doesn't seem interested in finding out (and why would he, if his father was a rapist?).
• He has met his mother – all of four or five times. She would walk twelve miles from the neighboring plantation to see him, though always at night so she could walk back and be ready to work by dawn.
• When his mother died he wasn't allowed to go to her burial.
• Douglass has no idea when his birthday is, or even what year it was. This is pretty common for slaves. When Douglass was an older man, by the way, he adopted February 14 as his birthday. He picked Valentine's Day, he said, because his mother had called him her "little Valentine."
• Douglass likes to tell us about his own life in order to depict slave life as a whole. Talking about his own parents is a way of showing how slavery prevents slaves from ever having normal families. For example, slave children unlucky enough to have their white masters as fathers would get whipped by their own fathers and brothers and were often sold to strangers to appease the jealousy of their father's white wife.
• Douglass predicts that so many children born of slaves and white masters will disprove the argument that slavery is justified by God's curse on Noah's son Ham, since before long, most slaves will be descended from both white and Black parents. (You can learn more about the Curse of Ham here.)
• Douglass remembers watching his master whip his Aunt Hester. He describes the blood and the insane fury of the beating in gruesome detail. You can tell how traumatic the event was by the way he describes it, giving us a picture through the eyes of a horrified child too innocent to understand what was happening.
• This event was a turning point for Douglass, the end of his innocence. As a much older writer, Douglass thinks back to the whipping and wonders whether there might have been something sexual in the way the overseer stripped his Aunt Hester naked before he whipped her. Her crime had been spending time with a slave from another plantation, and the master seems a little jealous.

Previous Next

More on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Navigation

Tired of ads?

Join today and never see them again.

This is day #26 of the One Book, One Day challenge. We’re going to speed read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. An American Slave. Written by Himself by Frederick Douglass at 500 words per minute (WPM) using AccelaReader.com.

Is 500 WPM Too Fast? Take Our Speed Reading Course To Keep Up!

About the Book:
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a memoir and treatise on abolition written by famous orator and ex-slave, Frederick Douglass. It is generally held to be the most famous of a number of narratives written by former slaves during the same period. In factual detail, the text describes the events of his life and is considered to be one of the most influential pieces of literature to fuel the abolitionist movement of the early 19th century in the United States. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass encompasses eleven chapters that recount Douglass’ life as a slave and his ambition to become a free man.

See previous books in the 30-day Challenge

Here are the most common words in the book…

Book Stats:
Pages: 101
How Long To Read: 82 minutes (at 500 WPM)
Published: 1845

Preface
Letter from Wendell Phillips, ESQ.
About Frederick Douglass
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5

Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Appendix

Share this post:

More Resources:

• Attend a live speed-reading course in your city
• Register for an online speed-reading course

Paul Nowak

Paul is the founder of Iris Reading, the largest provider of speed-reading and memory courses. His workshops have been taught to thousands of students and professionals worldwide at institutions that include: NASA, Google, HSBC and many Fortune 500 companies.

Day 27/30: Speed Read "Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche - 194 Pages in 126 Minutes

Day 25/30: Speed Read "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James - 122 Pages in 85 Minutes

What happens in Chapter 7 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

What happened in chapter 11 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?

How long does it take to read Frederick Douglass Narrative?

What grade level is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?