12 Years A Slave Sparknotes

12 Years a Slave explores the life of Solomon Northup and his struggles through the slave regime. The movie starts out with Northup as a free man in New York. It is shown that Solomon is a carpenter and musician who is treated almost as equally as the white men. Solomon is then kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. While Solomon’s first owner was benevolent and just to his slaves, the second was cruel and malevolent (especially to Solomon). Solomon somehow survives the years of enslavement, and in his 12th year he meets an abolitionist from Canada that helps him escape from bondage and find his family.
The film is accurate to Solomon Northup’s novel altogether and even brought some dialogue from the book to the screen. However, the film was not as descriptive as Northup’s memoir, which resulted in many shortcuts typically used by many book to film adaptations.
The other is that a white abolitionist named Bass helped Northup deliver a letter to his friends in the North to help set him free.

Despite all of these accurate attributes to this movie, there were some fictional elements. For example, the movie shows Mrs. Mary Epps throwing a glass at Patsey’s head out of a jealous rage when, in fact, it did not happen. Another is that when Northup and two others were planning to escape the slave ship, one of the conspirators got smallpox and died, he did not get stabbed. The last point is the fact that Solomon Northup had 3 children, not 2: Elizabeth, Margaret, and Alonzo.
Teaching history from movies can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is easier to remember events and facts if a movie is shown as well as the text, rather than just the text. On the other hand, movies tend to add fictional elements to add to its theatricality. This could make students remember fictional facts and events rather than what actually