Make-Up Post for Frederick Douglass

While reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I couldn't help but notice how his priorities were very apparent through his recollection of the past. To most of us, family is one of the most important things we think about. No matter what sort of relationship you have with your family members, it is difficult to see what life would be without them. Douglass establishes early on in his book that his mother was hardly present and his father's identity was uncertain. While sharing what brief moments he had with her before her death, he still seems very detached emotionally. However, while sharing the times where literacy was in his grasp, such as when he learned the ABC's, it is very obvious that this was a very important part of his life. Like I said, in our modern world it's hard to position literacy at a greater importance than our parents, which is what makes this part of Douglass' book so fascinating to me.

Here we see a great example of how powerful it was for slaves to learn how to read and write. It meant that they had a leg up on their owners and it could possibly end in being freed. Nowadays, learning to read is so common that many of us don't think of what it would be like to be considered inferior for not knowing how to read or write. Reading this narrative made me think a bit about just how much it would've meant to Douglass, or any slave from the time to be able to pick up a book and understand the writing in it. Especially where right now in my life, family has been one of my top priorities, it's interesting to see a perspective where something as simple as posting on a blog is considered a great part of life.

Italic vs. Non-italic

Page 192, "Yellowstone Park:"

Technically, this ought to precede "The Figures in the Clock," since it happened a year and a half before Miss Gowrie's play. But I have placed it here because in "Yellowstone Park" I seem older. This may have been because I was not in school. Also, in Medicine Springs, I was having to live up to a role that "grew me up" overnight. Once I was out of that curious wonderland where all the men were married, I shrank back to my nomral age."

I found this passage particularly interesting because it suggest that age is not really the same as the number of years which a person has lived; age can shift back and forth, from older to younger or younger to older, not in accordance with actual shifts in time. I thought this was remarkable because it suggests that, although McCarthy has not lied, she has readjusted chronology out of it's original order to make more chronological sense... a peculiar idea, but one that I find very appealing. I think that we may all experience moments when we feel older or younger than our "real" age, and I know that I have, so I felt I connected with this idea more than some others presented in this text.