Representations of Slavery and Freedom in Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative

The slave narrative as a literary genre occupies a foundational position in both African and African American literary traditions, and a comparison of Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass reveals how formerly enslaved writers constructed literary selfhood in opposition to the systems that attempted to deny their humanity. This study examined how both narratives deploy literacy, religious conversion, and rhetorical self-assertion as instruments of liberation in the double sense of physical freedom and the construction of authorial subjectivity. A postcolonial and Black Atlantic literary methodology drawing on Paul Gilroy and Henry Louis Gates Jr. was applied. Both texts situate the acquisition of literacy as the central turning point in the narrator's self-emancipation, establishing a parallel between the intellectual and the physical dimensions of freedom. The analysis showed that while Equiano's narrative is marked by his transoceanic mobility and commercial pragmatism, Douglass's is organised around a more geographically fixed but dramatically intensified confrontation with American racial slavery. Equiano's account of his Igbo origins provides a particularly significant dimension for Nigerian undergraduate readers, grounding the Atlantic slave trade in a specific South East Nigerian cultural context. The study recommends this pairing as essential reading for Comparative Literature and African Studies students at universities across all geopolitical zones in Nigeria.

Keywords: slave narrative, Equiano, Douglass, Atlantic slavery, literary selfhood