Preview

The Interesting Narrative Of Olaudah Equiano

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
178 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Interesting Narrative Of Olaudah Equiano
I choose to read From The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. I think the primary purpose for this was just for him to express what was going on with him in those specific times. I think he might have written to grow as a person and to inform others. I think he wanted to reminisce about the bad times and be glad that he was at a better place. He could also have written this to inform other people about his point of view. For example, to me when he was so amazed at the snow he thought it was salt and the watch that he felt was going to tell on him. It was all from his point of view and it was very interesting and emotional for me. It was a side that whites had never seen and might be

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Olaudah Equiano Loyal or not Olaudah Equiano was an African who was born to the Eboe people in 1745 in a place called Essaka. He recalls much of his childhood very vividly. He recalls the system of marriage that they had and how it was very strict because adultery was a severely punishable crime epically for females. He disused how marriages occurred within his people and how the girl’s parents would give her new husband a dowry which is a gift of some sort. He also discussed how they would all get together to build houses for everyone in the village and how his people extremely clean.…

    • 997 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”, by Olaudah Equiano, is a narrative about a slave going to the new world. Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped by slave traders to be sent to the New World to be sold to other slave owners. This slave trade between Africa and North America was from 1619-1807 and carried hundreds of African men, women, and children in one tightly packed ship. In “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”, Equiano describes the horrible conditions slaves were forced to endure on the voyage to the new world. Equiano wrote this slave narrative, a literary work that exposes the horrors of slavery through the first hand experience of the writer, to help abolish slavery. To assist in persuading the…

    • 194 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Questions for Ap Us History

    • 3857 Words
    • 16 Pages

    To tell history from the viewpoint of the victims and not overlooking what the country has done to become what they are today. It includes the cruelty and hardships the people had to go through.…

    • 3857 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Night Memoir Paper

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages

    I choose the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. It is a book about his experience, and also his family’s experiences throughout the holocaust. This book follows Elie and some of his family and friends from shortly before the holocaust all the way to his first moments being a free man. It describes his memories, his hopes, and his dreams. At certain points he almost gave up but he continued, survived, and got his horrifying message out to the world so people can look back on one of the worst parts of human history. The memoir genre feels like the author is just talking to you normally and telling you a story about a certain memory in his life. He really wants you to connect with the people he talks about and especially his family. This book is easily understandable if you have any idea of what the holocaust was. The way he writes this memoir, it is easy for you to get into the book and really start to see what he was seeing at the time. He has a couple main themes like his relationship with his father and darkness. However unlike a normal book, I feel he didn’t focus on the themes as much as he did as just getting the story out naturally. Books that usually are the memoir genre are about a big event in someone else’s life like a million little pieces, or about an event that affected everyone’s life like Night and the holocaust. I personally like memoirs over biography’s because they are more concise and have a narrower target audience. When I go to a library and pick up a memoir, I can usually tell if I’m going to like it or not because it tells you exactly what the author is going to talk about. If I read a biography, I could like the part of it that was interesting but not liked the parts I didn’t want to read about. An example is if I would want to read about the holocaust. I would rather read a memoir about the holocaust specifically than a biography that talk about the person’s life more before and after the event. I was fairly familiar with this genre before reading…

    • 1259 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    With love, The pungent smell of blood, sweat and tears filled the clean, crisp air. There lay a black boy, flat upon his chest, on the deck of a smooth sailing ship. His feet, hands and neck were bound with metal chains fastened to the railings of the ship. By his side stood a huge Oburoni armed with a long whip which he applied with merciless power and precision. Each stroke left a deep gash in the smooth, dark skin of the young boy, preceding the blood that followed.…

    • 1620 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Olaudah Equiano Slavery

    • 657 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Slaves, in general, endured unthinkable things while, on the Middle Passage Ship to the Americas as well as their duration in slavery, Olaudah Equiano was no different. After reading Olaudah Equiano’s, article “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African”. Slavery affected many lives. Most importantly, as any slave it was additionally agonizing to live in that period. Through Equiano’s eleven-year-old eyes, his voyage was extremely devastating.…

    • 657 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Eboe (Nigerian) born Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped as a child and sold to slave traders going to the West Indies, where after that he spent most of his life on ships serving the captains of slave ships and other navy vessels, presenting a more accurate insight into the importance of the slave trade to modernity. He was fortunate to save enough money to buy his freedom in 1766,also providing the idea of a lack of sailors if the risk was too high, as many seamen and sailors would die at sea due to the poor living conditions, allowing black men to earn some money during treacherous voyages. Equiano views each voyage as "an opportunity of getting a sum large enough to purchase" his liberty through his own trades. When Equiano eventually acquires…

    • 799 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Howard Zinn Book Analysis

    • 364 Words
    • 2 Pages

    History cannot be understood unless one looks at it from the perspective of the less-fortunate, or the masses. To quote, “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is” (10). History is often told from the point of view of the winner, and so to get a better understanding of history, one must view it from the point of view of the oppressed.…

    • 364 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    book of negroes essay

    • 1014 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In a person’s life, there will be times when one loses them self in the large and unpredictable world. An individual will be worse off, no matter what kind of losses an individual has to suffer. This is shown in The Book of Negroes. The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is a fictionalized, historical account that explores the story of the protagonist, Aminata, who is separated from her home, family, culture and faith. This book demonstrates the effectiveness of Hill's ability to portray imagery. Hill uses effective imagery to emphasize the fact that often loss is worse than death itself. This is shown through the book when Aminata loses her parents, her child and her home. These losses are worse than death itself.…

    • 1014 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    She drowned her kids out of her own selfishness and she stills searches for them today. The legend of La Llorona is still told today by many people but it originated in southeast Mexico around the eighteen hundreds. The history, purpose, impact, and modern telling all come together to prove the one theme that helps mothers and children across the world. Even though La Llorona wanted all the attention to herself which lead her to drowning her children , she teaches mothers to not have their emotions get in the way of what’s more important and teaches children to respect their mothers by having her story told to them when they are young.…

    • 1674 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Book of Negroes Essay

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages

    “The Book of Negroes is a master piece, daring and impressive in its geographic, historical and human reach, convincing in its narrative art and detail, necessary for imagining the real beyond the traces left by history.” I completely agree with The Globe and Mail’s interpretation of this story. One could almost see the desolate conditions of the slave boats and feel the pain of every person brought into slavery. Lawrence Hill created a compelling story that depicts the hard ships, emotional turmoil and bravery when he wrote The Book of Negroes.…

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Growing Up In Slavery

    • 454 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In this book, it explains the distress and grief these slaves had to face in their everyday lives. There is ten slaves and each of them wrote their own story about what they had to face each and everyday. For example, one of the slaves is Frederick Douglass. He was the most famous African American of the nineteenth century. This book, sets back into the eighteen hundreds and kids at eight years old would be taken away from their loved ones and were put to work like cattle by their new possessor. For example, Frederick Douglas at the age of eight was taken from his mother without even saying goodbye. Douglas had to call his new controller Aunt Kathy or he would get a flogging. He explains the misery he had to sustain and how many times he was beaten or punished to starve. For example, he wrote about his new owner Kathy, “The cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; the voice, made all of sweet accord changed to one harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon”. (Taylor, 2005, p. 58). Each slave at the end of their story explains their after life. Growing Up In Slavery makes you think of life in other people’s shoes and how it would make you feel if you were them.…

    • 454 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    He employed the word “we’’ many times and spoke in the first person perspective and puts the reader in a position in which they align themselves with the slaves. In Black’s perception, he views himself as being one of the slaves in the ship and talking about his experience throughout the whole journey. This is an important element in The Coming because he connected himself and identified with the other slaves. Also, in many African cultures, the community and family values are held in high esteem, and it was an integral part of the survival of many tribes. Moreover, he utilizes effective diction to relate with the African tribes, and the names of people have a significant meaning in their culture. Also, he used striking imagery to invoke the visual aspects of the conditions the slaves faced. For example, in the bottom of the slave ship, the slaves lived in putrid conditions which consisted of feces, body fluids, and pungent odors. Also, the food given to them tasted rotten and tasteless, but they have to consume it to survive. Their faces were filled with sorrow, grief, pain, and blame due to the harsh conditions. The slaves connected with each other by calling their names and humming, but the screams of crying fellow slaves were prevalent. The use of imagery was significant in illustrating the brutal living conditions the slaves experienced to evoke an emotional response from the…

    • 1364 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Detective Notes

    • 767 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Though the document is written as a diary or as a sort of holistic journal if you will, Arana Xajilá writes almost as if he has an audience; he certainly addressed the text as if someone were certain to read the words he wrote. Beginning on page 75 and continuing until the end of the text, Arana Xajilá repeatedly writes the phrase, “O my children.” The addressing of the reader as such suggests that Arana Xajilá writes not only to keep track of day-to-day events as a journal or diary should but perhaps to warn future generations of the pestilence that killed so many. The style of his writing itself is very vivid; Arana Xajilá describes the symptoms of the plague very vividly and provides a great number of details on the death around him. This gives the tone of the text a very morbid quality. Arana Xajilá seems almost helpless as he writes and the text itself reflects the pain of burying the dead, the fear the survivors held of perishing the same way their fathers and…

    • 767 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cain And Abel Analysis

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Gourevitch uses these stories in his memoir, so that readers will never be able to forget the haunting events that had happened to them. One story Gourevitch included in his memoir was Odette Nyiramilimo story. Odette was a Tutsi and she explained her life story, about how she was harassed and expelled from school for being a Tutsi. Eventually, Odette’s house was burned down by Hutus, so she had to live behind a bush for two months with her family. Odette was secretly put into school, where she wasn’t filed in the books because Tutsis were not allowed to enroll in school and participate. The life of Odette puts the reader in her shoes and conveys that the genocide had been happening for a long time. The genocide didn’t start when all of the mass killing had started, but when the harassment of Tutsis by Hutus were observed because even back then, Tutsis were murdered for being Tutsis. Gourevitch typically includes stories of Tutsis rather than Hutus, because Hutus never admit to what they have done and also for the reason of Gourevitch wanting to readers to be able to realize the amount of harassment and ethnocentrism the Tutsis had gotten from the Hutus. Laurenice Nyirabeza had told her story of how her family’s murderer was her next door neighbor. Considering that many Hutus had participated…

    • 790 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays