Frederick Douglass Page 7, Paragraph One

The first thing that i noticed was that the cruel man's name is "Mr. Severe." This is ironic because, as an extremely cruel overseer, he is a severe person. The main thing he uses is pathos pathos pathos. When he says the man would "whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at a time" in the midst of her "crying children," your stomach twists, especially the part where they're "pleading for their mother's release." Not only is this a horrible, almost physically painful image, the woman's children were watching, and begging the man to stop. Every time there are children involved, an argument (even a kind of ... passive? One like this, that is telling a story but never coming outright to say his argument) is made stronger, especially pathos. Another example of pathos is when Frederick Douglass says that he seemed to "take pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity." It immediately makes the reader think of a crazed lunatic who enjoys seeing all of his victims suffer. This description of the violent man is further by the man being a "profane swearer" who was "cursing, raving, cutting and slashing among the slaves of the field" from "the rising til the going down of the sun." The repetition of "horrid oaths" (which is repeated more in the rest of the chapter,) emphasizes how awful his language really was. I've also never read a story where you breath a sigh of relief when somebody dies, but when he says, "his career was short," I'm pretty sure most people would agree it was good. This paragraph affected me most,mostly because of the pathos.