Imagery in Frederick Douglass's Narrative
             Reading about the pains of Frederick Douglass's life as a slave is hard on the hearts of readers. Tales of rape, brutality, human degradation, and identity restriction, are horrific in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, and are all part of this detailed description of the immoral system of slavery. Douglass uses imagery in this story of his quest for freedom, to depict in our minds and hearts these cruel and ungodly wrongs of slavery.
             One of the accounts that Douglass first introduces is the lack of his mother in his life. He did know his mother but, due to the restrictions of slavery, was taken from her. He says, "I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life," and he goes on to describe how she only came to him at night, but was gone before he woke. The imagery that Douglass uses when describing the occurrence of his mother's death, depicts the isolation that he experienced,
             "I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew anything about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger." (697)
             How could people be kept away from their mother so that they feel nothing upon her passing? The fact that Douglass describes it so vividly and emotionally starts to draw the reader into knowing the anguish of slavery.
             Douglass uses imagery again when explaining about the final days of another family member, his beloved grandmother. She is made to live in a hut in the woods, by herself. Here, loneliness and death constitute the tone projected by his words:
             "The hearth is desolate. The children, who once sang and danced in her presenc...