Douglass' Narrative, particularly in the first few chapters, presents evidence in an objective and almost scientific manner. This wealth of verisimilitude adds an authentic feel to the work. Douglass may have been aware that other autobiographers sometimes added emotions and personal opinions into narratives. In particular, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic writers tended to extol the virtues of emotion in their works. One of the most famous of these autobiographies is Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a work marked by extensive use of emotional rhetoric. Douglass' work is consciously void of melodramatic discourse; he presents the atrocities of slavery without sensationalism or the Gothic horrors of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Douglass entitles his autobiography The Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself to stress his authorship of the work. There were other slave narratives in his time, some told by former slaves to white writers, and Douglass wanted to distinguish his work from other such narratives. The phrase "Written by Himself" persuasively makes the entire text seem more authentic. Douglass was aware that, on publishing his work, there would be racists who would charge that a self-educated fugitive slave could not possibly be capable of writing such an astute document. His statement of authorship is thus a pre-emptive rhetorical strategy to counter such racist critics.
