Abstract
Frederick Douglass autobiography has a points of departure of numerous critical studies of Afro-American literature, and origin of black fictional and non-fictional prose. There are scenes where the character learns to read, if often echoed in later black narratives. Tension between his desire to read and the objection of his master to his education, captures the distance between the interests of black subordinates and white superordinates. Process of literacy linked to that of liberation. Slave narrators affirm their psychological autonomy by telling the stories of their own lives. By fictionalizing one's life, one bestows a quality of authenticity on it. The processes of plot construction, characterization, and designation of beginnings and endings, the process of authorship provide the narrators with a measure of authority unknown to them in either real or fictional life. The narrators grant themselves significance and figurative power over their superordinates, and in their manipulation of received literary convention, they also engage with and challenge the dominant ideology.
