Autobiography is the coordination of the self as content--everything available in memory, perception, understanding, imagination, desire--and the self as shaped, formed in terms of a perspective and pattern of interpretation. (Michael Cooke, qtd in Gates, 239)

Gates begins by arguing that autobiography became a dominant literary genre in the eighteenth century. In the USA, "narratives of the escaped slave" (226) rose to prominence in the three decades before the Civil War. Gates’s thesis is that the slave narrative is a "counter genre, a mediation between the novel of sentiment ands the picaresque, oscillating somewhere between the two in a bipolar moment, set in motion by the mode of the confession" (226). The slave narrative "grafted together the conventions of two separate literary traditions and became its own form" (227). Douglass’ Narrative is a good example of how the "resemblances between confession and picaresque informed the narrative shape of Afro-American fiction" (229), shaping in particular the "development of point of view in black fiction for the next hundred years" (229).

Another great influence upon the slave narrative is the American romance which couples satire with self-expression: as

with other American romantic modes of narration, the language of the slave narratives remains primarily an expression of the self, a conduit for particularly personal emotion. In this sort of narrative, language was meant to be merely a necessary but unfortunate instrument. In the slave narratives, this structuring of the self couples with the minute explication of gross evil and human depravity. (229)

Gates adds that the typical journey North toward freedom is a leitmotif in these texts of the "evolution of consciousness within the slave--from an identity as property and object to a sublime identity as human being and subject" (230). The structure of the slave narrative is such that the "writer and the subject merge into the stream of language" (230).

Gates argues that the slave narratives played an indispensable ideological role in promoting the abolitionist cause and are motivated by the desire to "impose a new form onto the world" (230). The concern of the slave narrator is with "verisimilitude" (231) and with locating the responsibility for the suffering of the slave squarely with the Master-slave economy of the South. Douglass’ Narrative attempts to "reproduce a system of signs that we have come to call plantation culture" (232). As a result, we glimpse an

ordering of the world based on a profoundly relational type of thinking, in which a strict barrier of difference or opposition forms the basis of a class rather than, as in other classification schemes, an ordering based on resemblances or the identity of two or more elements. (233)

Douglass’ narrative strategy seeks to bring together

two terms in special relationships suggested by some quality that they share; then, by opposing two seemingly unrelated elements, such as the sheep, cattle, or horses on the plantation and the specimen of life known as the slave, Douglass’ language is made to signify the presence and absence of some quality--in this case, humanity. Douglass uses this device to explicate the slave’s understanding of himself and of his relation to the world through the system of perceptions that defined the world that the planters made. (233)

In short, Douglass’ conception of the world is the function of a system of binary opposites (what Gates terms the "symbolic code of this world" [234]) imposed by the slave master: self versus other, "lord and bondsman" (234), culture versus nature (the horse was constructed as the slave’s "closest blood relations" [234]), cyclical time versus linear time (the slave was not permitted to know his birth date), patrilinearity versus matrilinearity (the slave would often only know who was his mother), day versus night (which the slave "metaphorically owned" [236]), etc.:

spiritual/material, aristocratic/base, civilised/barbaric, sterile/fertile, enterprise/sloth, force/principle, fact/imagination, linear/cyclical, thinking/feeling, rational/irrational, chivalry/cowardice, grace/brutishness, pure/cursed, and human/beastly. (236)

Gates proceeds to argue that Douglass’s text functions deconstructively: he "commences as mediator and as trickster to reverse the relations of the opposition" (236). The boundary between black and white, master and slave, human and inhuman, is blurred by Douglass’s Narrative. He points out, for example, that the wife of the slave master, the "proverbial carrier of culture" (236), in compelling her husband to sell off the "illegitimate offspring" (236) of his liaisons with slave women, perverts nature by making the "economic relation" (236) have priority over the "kinship tie" (236). The

slaveowner’s world negates and even perverts those very values on which it is built. Deprivation of a birthdate, a name, a family structure, and legal rights makes of the deprived brute a subhuman, says Douglass, until he comes to a consciousness of these relations; yet, it is the human depriver who is the actual barbarian structuring his existence on the consumption of human flesh. Just as the mulatto son is a mediation between two opposed terms, man and animal, so too has Douglass’s text become the complex mediator between the world as the master would have it and the world as the slave knows it really is. Douglass has subverted the terms of the code he was meant to mediate; he has been a trickster. . . . Douglass’s narrative has aimed to destroy the symbolic code that created the false oppositions themselves. The oppositions, all along, were only arbitrary, not fixed. (236-237)

In short, the

master’s actions belie the metaphysical suppositions on which is based the order of his world. . . . It is a world whose oppositions have generated their own mediator, Douglass himself. This mulatto son, half-animal, half-man, writes a text (which is itself another mediation) in which he can expose the arbitrary nature of the signs found in this world. ‘You have seen how a man was made a slave,’ Douglass writes at the structural centre of the Narrative, ‘you shall see how a slave was made a man.’ (237-238)

Douglass’ text initiates an "inversion of the initial state of the oppositions through the operations of the mediator himself" (238) and as a result of which "slave has become master, creature has become man, object has become subject. . . . [C]reature has assumed self, and the assumption of self has created a race" (238).

Dominant and emerging literary forms (Picaresque, sentimental novel, American romance, slave narrative) + Binary opposites constituting the symbolic order of plantation culture —> Narrative —> Our sense of Douglass’ identity —> Symbolic order of plantation culture deconstructed in his person (mulatto) + the African literary tradition