Loading Likes... One thing that struck me while reading Narrative of the Life was the extreme attention to detail that Douglass had to afford to every single story he put forth in his autobiography. When you consider the context of his audience at the time of publishing, it’s surprising that he went into so much detail about matters that would actually be very familiar to a white and black American audience. The experiences he talks about, and their extension to larger societal structures at play at the time, were widely known and accepted social conventions. For example, the assertion that if he had been murdered with only black people as witnesses, “their testimony combined would have been insufficient to have arrested one of the murderers” (1215) was not a surprising or unique statement at the time; black people were regarded as sub-human, and not capable of intelligence or authority by white society in this time. However, by painting the vivid picture of this experience he had, and stating this horrible inequality in plain terms, he commands authority and attention to these horrible facts, which is incredibly brave to do in a society that aims to erase and placate them.