Questions: The Slave Narrative

Question 1

Why do many slave narratives carry the subtitle 'Written by Himself' or 'Written by Herself'?

• A. To show that a publisher had edited the text heavily
• B. To assert the narrator's own authorship and literacy against readers who doubted that an enslaved person could write
• C. To signal that the book was a novel based on true events
• D. To meet a legal requirement for all autobiographies of the period

Answer: (B)

Literacy was itself evidence in the argument against slavery. Claiming authorship on the title page answered the racist claim that enslaved people lacked the capacity for intellectual work.

Question 2

Prefaces by white abolitionists were attached to slave narratives because the narratives were fictional.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

The prefaces were authenticating documents meant to reassure white readers that the narrator was real and truthful. Douglass's Narrative opens with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter from Wendell Phillips.

Question 3

Which statement about Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is accurate?

• A. It was published under her own name with a preface by Frederick Douglass
• B. It was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent and describes years she spent hiding in a tiny attic space
• C. It was written in the 1930s for a government interview project
• D. It describes life as a free person in London

Answer: (B)

Jacobs used the name Linda Brent, and Lydia Maria Child edited the book. She describes hiding for about seven years in a crawlspace in her grandmother's house. Its authenticity was doubted for over a century until historian Jean Fagan Yellin documented it in the 1980s.

Question 4

Douglass writes: 'You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.' What does this sentence do in the Narrative?

Model answer: It marks the turning point of the book, his fight with the slave-breaker Edward Covey, and uses reversed word order (chiasmus) to show slavery reversed. It claims that resistance restored his sense of manhood and selfhood.

The sentence works rhetorically and structurally. Its mirror shape enacts the reversal it describes, and it divides the narrative into the process of being enslaved and the process of self-liberation.