Logos, Pathos, and Ethos in

Logos, Pathos, and Ethos in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. To make his case for the abolition of slavery, Douglass uses classical appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos. In this brief paper, a number of those appeals will be highlighted, and outline notes concerning Douglass' rhetoric, audience, purpose and exegesis will be offered. Ethos is an appeal to one's character or credibility, designed to persuade. Douglass makes such appeals by telling his life story in such a way that it seems entirely believable.

Where he knows events, such as names of various masters and places of various plantations or homes in which he was kept, he gives them. However, he is also candid about what he doesn't know, including such critical information as his own age (I).

When he speaks of his life on Colonel Lloyd's plantation (V) and elsewhere, he does not exaggerate for effect but tells, for example, that he was not whipped much but suffered from hunger and cold, and that to alleviate the cold he stole a bag to wrap himself in at night. In fact, he speaks of feeling almost guilty that, when he met other slaves at an estate valuation, their lives had been more difficult than his (VIII). By being honest about his background, he presents himself as trustworthy.

This makes his descriptions of the horrors of slavery believable as well. Finally, Douglass, in using the language meticulously throughout, and in showing himself knowledgeable about the Bible (III), popular knowledge (V), oration (VII), and the like, comes across as learned and competent. Pathos is an appeal to emotion. Douglass makes liberal use of pathos throughout, as when he talks about not knowing his mother well because of the fact that they were separated by different masters.

He tells of how she walked twelve miles to see him after working in the fields, only to lie down with him and hold him for a while, before getting up early to walk back and work another day. He tells of witnessing his Aunt Hester being brutally whipped until bloody because she had gone out without permission in the company of a male slave (I) He uses words such as cruel, profane, and blasphemous, to describe masters such as Mr. Severe (II). He speaks of Mr.

Gore's "savage barbarity" (IV). He describes how slaves such as his mother die young, and lives like his own are wrecked by having families torn apart (V). He tells of how Mr. Auld did not want him to learn to read because "If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell" (VI). He tells how he wished he were dead, so horrible was the stress of being a slave (VII), and tells of being lined up and valuated like livestock (VIII).

In all of these events, Douglass emphasizes the dehumanizing quality of his position and the brutality of his oppressors. This make him a sympathetic character, and leads the reader to reject those would treat such a knowledgeable soul so poorly. Logos is an appeal to reason to persuade.

In the first chapter, Douglass make such an appeal when arguing that it cannot be possible that slavery is naturally justified in the Bible because of the curse of Ham, since slaves like himself, who have lineages with white fathers, are not direct descendents of the Biblical Ham. The rhetorical situation of Douglass can be found in the fact that a slave had taught himself to read and write and,.