On page 1228, Douglass explains that he "would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave" in order to "render the tyrant no aid" in recapturing their runaway slaves. Earlier in the narrative, he keeps unrevealed the names of the White children who helped him learn to read so that they do not receive blame or chastisement from the White community for helping him on his quest for freedom.
These examples demonstrate that the practical effects of his writing motivated him to restrain certain details. This consistently reinforces its genre as historical, rather than literary, writing; however the themes and motifs that he crafts and the narrative voice he captures establish the work as literary. I think one of the work's most intriguing aspects is how it vacillates between these two genres, as if calling into question the distinction at all.
I think one can draw some interesting parallels between the unknown or the withheld in the texts we've examined from Poe, Douglass and, to an extent, Hawthorne. Poe and Hawthorne are more obviously connected being that they were contemporaries and competitors, but I think their similarities run deeper than merely writing around the same time. The narrator's attachment of some sort of vaguely supernatural force to the scarlet letter points the reader almost straight to Poe, as does the pacing in "The Custom House." Hawthorne, much like Poe but with a taste for more drawn out affairs, controls the pace of his story so as to emphasize certain elements. Douglass enacts a similar sort of control over his narrative for similar purposes. He obviously writes for a different audience and from a different set of contexts, but there are tics in his writing, particularly his reserve and judicious revealing of information, that one can put into conversation with Poe and with Hawthorne.
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