In the Narrative, Douglass shows slaveholding to be damaging not only to the slaves themselves, but to slave owners as well. The corrupt and irresponsible power that slave owners enjoy over their slaves has a detrimental effect on the slave owners' own moral health.
Explanation:
He thinks that if he were an animal, he wouldn’t have the ability to think and worry about his circumstances. Now that he can read, Douglass is tormented by his constant thoughts about his life as a slave and the impossibility of freedom. He regards slaveholders as “a band of successful robbers” and as “the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. Douglass’s purpose is to express his thoughts and feelings about being enslaved and about the effects of literacy. He relates three events that help him achieve his goal: his mistress teaching him to read, his further pursuit of instruction from “all the little white boys,” and the acquisition of certain reading materials that encouraged his own thoughts and feelings about slavery.
