Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Speakers use rhetorical questions—questions to which a response is not expected—to encourage an audience to ponder an issue. Jacobs uses them to help the reader consider the complexity of her condition, especially as she navigates the reader through a series of difficult and life-risking decisions.

She also uses this literary device to drive White readers into understanding the horrors of slavery and the anguish of those who were in its clutches, particularly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. For instance, after enumerating the various situations in which the law had placed African American families, Jacobs asks, “But what cared the legislators of the ‘dominant race’ for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?” (282). Jacobs places “dominant race” in quotes, both to draw attention to the myth of White supremacy and to elucidate the irony of a supposedly “superior” people resorting to the base behavior of tearing apart families and holding others in bondage.

Slave narratives are written in the first-person, allowing the formerly enslaved, who were typically forbidden access to reading and writing by law, the authority of telling their own stories. This