General rules for changing direct speech into indirect speech. Omit all inverted commas or quotation marks. End the sentence with a full stop. If the verb inside the inverted commas/quotation marks is in the present tense, change it into the corresponding past tense.
Answer: The answer is below.
Comparing:
Both of the themes from these excerpts are about how you can be able to learn despite differences in yourself from others.
Contrasting:
The theme of <em>The Story of My Life</em> by Helen Keller is that you are able to do anything you put your mind to, even if you are physically impaired in some way.
The main theme in the excerpt of <em>The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass</em>, is that you can learn how to do things even if you are of a different ethnic background.
In other words, the main character in the story are different in different ways (one is blind, the other was of a different ethnicity)