Question 2: Compare and Contrast
Slave narratives were accounts that were firsthand of the African Americans that experienced slavery in most parts of their lives. They are also accounts of former slaves or fugitives that either got written or told orally(Anatol et al., 2020). Most of the narratives that got written of the slave experiences were by using the amanuensis because most of the African Americans had no formal education to be able to write. The main theme that gets discussed in the three slave narratives, Henry Bibb’s,Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb:An American Slave, Solomon Northup’s, Twelve Years a Slave, and Harriet Jacobs’, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is slavery as the narrators provide accounts of how they became slaves, how some of them escaped slavery and their lives after slavery. The three narrators are abolitionists whose writings were meant to express the plight of the slaves in the South and elicit mercy from the northerners in a bid to have slavery abolished.
Whilethey have a common similarity, there is also contrast in their narratives as discussed below. While the narratives by Henry Bibb and Harriet Jacobs got written by themselves, the narrative by Solomon Northup was written with the assistance of an amanuensis who was not an abolitionist and whose only desire in the narrative was the profit he was gaining from the narrative. Henry Bibb was born a slave, and Harriet Jacobs was also born a slave who later escaped, with her narrative bringing out the sexual and psychological torments of being a slave from the perspective of a woman(Hricinová, 2020). Solomon Northup was born a free man, but later after 30 years of freedom, he got kidnapped and sold to slavery.
References
Anatol, G. L., Raussert, W., & Michael, J. (2020). Slave narratives. In The Routledge Handbook to the Culture and Media of the Americas (pp. 226-238). Routledge.
Hricinová, M. (2020). Slave narratives: Life of a female slave.