Slavery is an issue that was controversial in the Nineteenth Century. Both Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are examples of literature that are about slavery. They display the life of a slave and how the slaves dealt with their situations. In each story, the slaves rebelled against the owners. The slaves had an instinct that made them revolt in this way when their lives were at a very low point. Revolutions are in human nature and some reasons that cause an individual to revolt will be observed.
             Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass were authors that wrote on similar subjects sometimes, but they had very different viewpoints on the morality of slavery. Since Douglass was a slave himself for most of his life, his viewpoint is a little more relevant than that of Melville, a white man. For instance, Douglass could describe situations that only and slave could imagine such as this one: "I suffered much from hunger, but much more from cold. In hottest summer and coldest winter, I was kept almost naked--no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees. I had no bed" (16). This point of view gives the reader much more sympathy than a person telling a story from a separate background does.
             However, Melville overlooked the compassion for the slaves, which can have just as much effect because the reader can be angry with Melville for discounting the feelings of the slaves. An illustration of his point of view is the following: "especially the conspicuous figures of four elderly grizzled Negroes, their heads like black, doddered willow tops, who, in venerable contrast to the tumult below them, were couched sphynx-like, one on the starboard cat-head, another on the larboard, and the remaining pair face to face on the opposite bulwarks above the main-chains" (41). Melville describes the Negroes dif...