Discuss those the characteristics of a slave narrative in Fredrick Douglass’ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” and take a stance on their significance in the text.

Discuss those the characteristics of a slave narrative in Fredrick Douglass’ “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” and take a stance on their significance in the text.
ACTION 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN LIT

DQ 1
Actions for Week 6 DQ 1

Read James Olney’s article, “I Was Born”: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” Choose three of his characteristics of a slave narrative. Discuss those three characteristics in Fredrick Douglass’ narrative and take a stance on their significance in the text.

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DQ 2
Actions for Week 6 DQ 2

In the Fredrick Douglass’s text, the sentence, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” Discuss the difference in Fredrick Douglass, the narrative, the language, etc. before and after this statement. What makes this statement siginificant?

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DQ 3
Actions for Week 6 DQ 3

The Holocaust of Enslavement allowed the slave owners to employ physical and psychological tactics to control the enslaved. At times the psychological constraints were stronger than the physical constraints. The enslaved are described with animalistic characteristics. What are the descriptions? Why are they significant? What are the psychological implications of the characteristics? What is the psychological implication of the holiday on the enslaved?

46 “I WAS BORN”: SLAVE NARRATIVES, THEIR STATUS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AS LITERATURE* by James Olney Anyone who sets about reading a single slave narrative, or even two or three slave narratives, might be forgiven the natural assumption that every such narrative will be, or ought to be, a unique production; forso would go the unconscious argument-are not slave narratives autobiography, and is not every autobiography the unique tale, uniquely told, of a unique life? If such a reader should proceed to take up another half dozen narratives, however (and there is a great lot of them from which to choose the half dozen), a sense not of uniqueness but of overwhelming sameness is almost certain to be the result. And if our reader continues through two or three dozen more slave narratives, still having hardly begun to broach the whole body of material (one estimate puts the number of extant narratives at over six thousand), he is sure to come away dazed by the mere repetitiveness of it all: seldom will he discover anything new or different but only, always more and more of the same. This raises a number of difficult questions both for the student of autobiography and the student of Afro-American literature. Why should the narratives be so cumulative and so invariant, so repetitive and so much alike? Are the slave narratives classifiable under some larger grouping (are they history or literature or autobiography or polemical writing? and what relationship do these larger groupings bear to one another?); or do the narratives represent a mutant development really different in kind from any other mode of writing that might initially seem to relate to them as parent, as sibling, as cousin, or as some other formal relation? What narrative mode, what manner of story-telling, do we find in the slave narratives, and what is the place of memory both in this particular variety of narrative and in autobiography more generally? What is the relationship of the slave narratives to later narrative modes and later thematic complexes of Afro-American writing? The questions are multiple and manifold. I propose to come at them and to offer some tentative answers by first making some observations about autobiography and its special nature as a memorial, creative act; then outlining some of the common themes and nearly invariable conventions of slave narratives; and finally attempting to determine the place of the slave narrative 1) in the spec- *This essay will appear in The Slave’s Narrative, ed. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984). 47 trum of autobiographical writing, 2) in the history of American literature, and 3) in the making of an Afro-American literary tradition. I have argued elsewhere that there are many different ways that we can legitimately understand the word and the act of autobiography; here, however, I want to restrict myself to a fairly conventional and common-sense understanding of autobiography. I will not attempt to define autobiography but merely to describe a certain kind of autobiographical performance-not the only kind by any means but the one that will allow us to reflect most clearly on what goes on in slave narratives. For present purposes, then, autobiography may be understood as a recollective/narrative act in which the writer, from a certain point in his life-the present-, looks back over the events of that life and recounts them in such a way as to show how that past history has led to this present state of being.

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