As the title
of the book indicates, this is the story of the life of . What holds the book together are the
events that befall Douglass himself: almost all of the incidents and adventures he accounts are
the eye-witness experiences of a slave.
Luckily for the structure of the
narrative, Douglass's life was divided into distinct periods, demarcated by his movement from
one place to another. The early chapters of the book, therefore, cohere around the first seven
or eight years of his life on Colonel Lloyd's plantation. All of the additional stories he tells
or comments he makes that are not directly about his life in this period nevertheless relate to
what life was like for a slave on a large planation. For example, the story of the slave sold
south because he dared to say he was unhappy comes out of Douglass' early planation
experience.
Douglass uses his geographic moves as a hinge with which to usher
us into different parts of his narrative. For example, he states:
I was probably between seven and eight years old when I left Colonel Lloyd's
plantation. I left it with joy. I shall never forget the ecstasy with which I received the
intelligence that my old master (Anthony) had determined to let me go to Baltimore, to live with
Mr. Hugh Auld, brother to my old master's son-in-law, Captain Thomas Auld.
He then changes his focus to Baltimore andthe life of a house slave
in a big city, which he finds superior to that of a plantation slave, though darkened by his
growing realization that he will always be a slave.
The next hinge is his
move back to the plantation, and so it goes until Douglass escapes to freedom, when he offers a
short account of his time after slavery and the fear with which he still must live.
Without the physical moves, Douglass would have had a harder time structuring his
story, but with them it has the feeling of a bildungsroman, a novel of a young person's journey
or development in their formative years, a story that never loses sight of the sins of
slavery.
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