Slave mutiny as argument, argument as fiction, fiction as America: The case of Frederick Douglass's the heroic slave

Abstract

Based on the historical incident of a slave mutiny The Heroic Slave served as another important weapon in combating slavery. The nautical revolt provided Douglass an opportunity to hone argumentative strategies that he had wielded for years on the platform, strategies that he varied by writing fiction. For him, each act of speaking and writing repeated, intensified, and varied the form of his argument. In both his orations and The Heroic Slave, the crusading abolitionist advanced what Kenneth Burke calls a “perspective by incongruity. “In this essay we will apply Burke's theory to analyze Douglass's perspective, and will apply and adjust structuralist notions of Claude Levi‐Strauss (1986) and Frederic Jameson (1972) to examine the rhetorical problem facing Douglass and the interargumentation that he produced to transform and overcome it.