Of the sentence that begins “My feet have been so cracked,” Robert Stepto writes “The pen, symbolizing the quest for literacy fulfilled, actually measures the wounds of the past, and this measuring process becomes a metaphor in and of itself for the artful composition of travail transcended” (20).
With regard to this homophones “Freeland” and “free land,” Robert Stepto says “Douglass seems to fashion these passages for both his readership and himself” (20). This suggests that if the original purpose for black writers was to prove their humanity to white people, Douglass transcends this goal, writing for his own purposes instead of just to confront the preconceptions of a skeptical white audience.
Robert Stepto writes that the internal rhyming of “‘saddened’ and ‘gladdened'” “is persuasive because it is pleasant, and because it offers the illusion of a reasoned conclusion” (21).
In response to the sentence that begins “My long-crushed spirit rose,” Stepto writes that effusive writing linked “certain slave narratives with the popular sentimental literary forms of the nineteenth century,” but that “Douglass’s passages of introspective analysis create fresh space for themselves in the American literary canon” (22).
In keeping with her religious reading of the text, Lucinda MacKethan compares the prospect of Henry eating his pass to “the Holy Communion” rite of eating “the word” (66). This corresponds to her theory that Douglass’s transformation from an illiterate slave to a word-wielding free man parallels religious tales of conversion.
In response to these first lines, William L. Andrews writes “Here Jacobs seems acutely aware of a paradox informing her situation as an ex-slave autobiographer: the refusal to tell all the truth would be the most effective way for her to parry the charge of not telling the truth.” These lines appear in an article entitled “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.”