Monday, September 29, 2003

Paper I wrote last night.

Mood: Tired
Music: None

Well, we had to take these paragraphs, from the Fredrick Douglass Slave Narrative:

"If at any one time of my life, more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr. Covey. We were worked all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, snow, or hail too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than the night. The longest days were too short for him, and the shortest nights were too long for him. I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there; but a few months of his discipline tamed me. Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed; my intellect languished; the disposition to read departed; the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!

Sunday was my only leisure time. I spent this in a sort of beast-like stupor, between sleep and wake, under some large tree. At times, I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, flickered for a moment, and then vanished. I sank down again, mourning over my wretched condition. I was sometimes prompted to take my life, and that of Covey, but was prevented by a combination of hope and fear. My sufferings on this plantation seem now like a dream rather than a stern reality.

Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake bay, whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe. Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:

"You are loosed from your moorings, and free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O, that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me <171 ANGUISH BEYOND DESCRIPTION>and you the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as with fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom. The steamboats steered in a north-east coast from North Point. I will do the same; and when I get to the head of the bay, I will turn my canoe adrift, and walk straight through Delaware into Pennsylvania. When I get there, I shall not be required to have a pass; I will travel without being disturbed. Let but the first opportunity offer, and come what will, I am off. Meanwhile, I will try to bear up under the yoke. I am not the only slave in the world. Why should I fret? I can bear as much as any of them. Besides, I am but a boy, and all boys are bound to some one. It may be that my misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free. There is a better day coming."

I shall never be able to narrate the mental experience through which it was my lot to pass during my stay at Covey's. I was completely wrecked, changed and bewildered; goaded almost to madness at one time, and at another reconciling myself to my wretched condition. Everything in the way of kindness, which I had experienced at Baltimore; all my former hopes and aspirations for usefulness in the world, and the happy moments spent in the exercises of religion, contrasted with my then present lot, but increased my anguish. "

And then write what and why the third paragraph (the one where he quotes himself speaking) is different, and what stylistic natures it uses. So here is my paper:

The stylistic natures of Douglass' narration of him sitting, staring out at water, ships sailing about, him speaking but to himself as well as the Almighty, is something of beauty in its own. Being about three paragraphs long, the first two paragraphs merely convey some feeling of Douglass's, while the third grabs hold of the roots of the first two, growing an illegitimate yet haply dreaming thing which roots out something of a black rose. The third paragraph, in comparison to the first two, is quite different in rhetoric, style, diction, and word choice. By this, it shall be shown how.

The first two paragraphs merely set the scene, allowing grace and style in the third paragraph. They allow a transition to amount in a smooth, borderline, seamless fashion. These two paragraph form the muscle of the passage as a whole, pushing their mighty hands in coercion, rooting deep roots in the reader's head, and catching them into the start as it is pushed to an end. They, it could be said, do the labor of the birth, pushing, heaving, shoving; closing in the reader, they blend the paragraphs all as a whole, and form what could never be without that of the uprooting and second conception of the third paragraph.

"My thoughts would...with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:--," is the last sentence of these two paragraphs. This sentence itself sums the meaning of the two paragraphs as a whole: anchors which weight down and transition; anchors which, by their weights, pulley themselves to a stop, and rest the rest of the ship—the third paragraph—into its own lullaby and eventual sleep. Through this, the impact of third paragraph is given a steel knuckle to its otherwise skeletal hand, which, alone, would amount to nothing but a dull thud to a reader's care. Given this, the third paragraph comes unaware to the reader, and siphons them in.

It starts right off strong and hard with its parallelisms, jumping back and forth between apostrophes to the ship, telling the ships of their states, then using that as a comparison to Douglass's own conditions. "You are loosed from your moorings, and are free," Douglass first begins, using an effective syntax which is right to the point, sparing no time to belabor. Then he continues with, "I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!" By doing this, he causes a double punch to hit the reader, and the reader to interpret these two parallelisms and juxtapositions as a comparison which in the reader's mind should amount to one thing as a whole: how Douglass feels, and how it unfair, how he sees it as something unfair. By personifying the ships, he gives them an entire new feel, one that clamps onto the reader, almost an allusion to freedom, like some rotten sweet fruit which Douglass yearns to have and taste and congest.

Douglass keeps at this, placing in an effective syntax that flows nicely, with nice puddles and muddying imagery by the use of metaphors. Then, beginning the thirty-eighth line, he begins a sub transition within the paragraph, eating into the reader further. "O that I were free!" he says, concise as ever, using the blatant truth to shower his feelings on the reader. "O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under you protecting wing!" he continues, using the ships yet again as an allusion to his feelings, further placing the reader in his psyche, forcing them to understand.
Going on, Douglass taints his words in God, showing his desperation by his use of exclamation points and the rapidness at which his words dance around as if they are scrambling everywhere in a beautiful mess. By these quick use of small, simple sentences in his speech, he quickens the pace, covering the momental arc in something that goes beyond just the textual and verbal readings of the passage; he, more or less, makes this paragraph more than it is by these eloquent uses of style. He succeeds in even grasping the reader further, with the mention of God, and his desperate pleas.

From here, lines forty-five and on, the use of I begins to cover the text like a lingering weed, further showing the desperation in its usage. He stops comparing his chains of slavery to the freedom of the ships, and begins to fight with himself in a verbal battle, which must be much, or near like, that that the reader feels as well. "Why am I slave," he asks, then uses this to grow on, going into, "I will run away." From this, he begins to reason things out to himself, and shows the reader what they are already coming to—the realization that freedom is an obtainable goal, and that, even as hard as it would be to have for a slave, is a reality. The tone of the paragraph all the rest of the way now turns to choking desperation until some type of decision is reached.

Going on, the paragraph begins to numb the reader, like an overload of thoughts and notions causing a scatter and rush. It further shows the great use of this endless apostrophe's syntax, how Douglass grasps hold of the reader so desperately, like some side-glanced thing, and just covers them in aphorisms that go far beyond just showing a point. Getting the reader to care in some case by not just blatantly saying something is a hard thing to do—and Douglass accomplishes this well, in some way, with this one paragraph.

"Yes! God helping me, I will," Douglass decides as he finally starts bleeding into his decision. From this line, fifty-one and on, he begins saying that he will begin to look for freedom, that he will do it, no matter the consequences. The use of I as a weed commercializes in this part of the paragraph, toning and tainting everything with desperate want and need; giving everything that Douglass says his own need, and the means that he will do it. The rhetoric of this part—and the earlier parts—of this paragraph are true genius. Rather than arguing with the reader, he rather shoves it into his own bitter fight, forcing the reader to not feel targeted, but rather forced to sit in Douglass's true feelings, and understand how he feels and why he has his motives. This placing of himself into the reader accomplishes more than any other way could have. It allows him to reason out things to himself, and allows the reader to do the same, without the reader or Douglass having to intervene in any way other than Douglass to himself, and the readers to themselves.

"It may be that my misery in slavery will only increase my happiness when I get free," Douglass finally concludes. "There is a better day coming." And then the paragraph ends, leaving the reader and Douglass to think out things, ending in a hysterically dreamy conclusion that "there is a better day coming." He uses this to finally quell all else that the third paragraph has bantered, summing it all up that through all this pain and misery he has felt, he must not be alone, and that one day he must be free, that he will, in hope, see better days. The rhetoric itself brings finality to this—seemingly leaving the reader feeling full with this sense of hope, and finally left with some parting answer to Douglass's battle with himself. This is the rhetorical purpose, and the main difference with this paragraph to the other two as a whole; he uses this third paragraph to eat and feed into the reader, making them see as he sees, feel as he feels, and fight alongside him as he fights with himself. This third paragraph is almost like an unwinding of the anchors the first two placed, finally lifting their coiled weight, he dirties them with his apostrophe, capturing the essence of everything he sought to do with this entire passage.

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