Douglass's diction is, in general, clear, sincere, and straightforward, but he also uses poetic devices in this final chapter to try to convey the intensity of slavery's cruelty.
For instance, he uses repetition in his sentence structure to create a sense of poetic rhythm in the following passage, beginning both sentences with "I would." He also builds a sense of rhythm through assonance, the repetition of words beginning with the same vowel, such as "ignorant," "imagine," "invisible," and "infernal:"
I would keep the merciless slaveholder profoundly ignorant of the means of flight adopted by the slave. I would leave him to imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch from his infernal grasp his trembling prey.
Below is another example of the same diction. Douglass again uses repetition in sentence structure and this time alliteration in the repeated "l" and "f" sounds. The elevated language is meant to elevate the plight of the slave:
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
Douglass also uses the literary device of parallelism to contrast the benefits of slaveholding with the evils of being a slave:
He received all the benefits of slaveholding without its evils; while I endured all the evils of a slave, and suffered all the care and anxiety of a freeman.
Douglass is not so much saying freedom is the same as bondage as he is expressing that having escaped his masters does not make him wholly free: he still lives with the insecurity and fear that he may be seized by slave hunters at any time. Second, he conveys that while he is very grateful to be free, freedom does not come without a price. He has had to leave Baltimore and give up everything and everyone he once knew. He again uses poetic diction to express this, using several similes (he feels he has escaped from pirates and a hungry den of lions) to express his joy at freedom but then saying in quite simple language that he feels lonely and insecure:
I suppose I felt as one may imagine the unarmed mariner to feel when he is rescued by a friendly man-of-war from the pursuit of a pirate. In writing to a dear friend, immediately after my arrival at New York, I said I felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions. This state of mind, however, very soon subsided; and I was again seized with a feeling of great insecurity and loneliness.
Frederick Douglass's notion that there is some enslavement in freedom arises from the fact that even in his life as a free man there are conditions to which he feels bound.
In Chapter XI, after having finally escaped his slavery, Douglass writes,
I would allow myself to suffer under the greatest imputations which evil-minded men might suggest, rather than exculpate myself, and thereby run the hazard of closing the slightest avenue by which a brother slave might clear himself of the chains and fetters of slavery.
In this passage, Douglass employs a rhetoric that strongly emphasizes his willingness to be maligned by being accused of criminal activities or the like rather than to reveal how he escaped slavery and be the cause of "a brother slave" being captured or kept from escaping.
Douglass's diction is effective in this chapter and in others as well as as he employs strong, evocative words and descriptive metaphors. Examples of metaphors in the above cited passage that create expressive images for the readers are the unstated comparison of the path of freedom to "the slightest avenue" and enslavement to the "chains and fetters of slavery."
While the metaphor of slavery's "chains and fetters" does express a literal condition of enslavement, it also forms a comparison between enslavement as a fettering, or restricting, of both the body and the mind. In this respect, then, Douglass, who is free physically from slavery, yet feels fettered in mind and in spirit by the social conditions that exist in his country.
Further, Douglass makes the argument that those who run the underground railroad but speak of it run the risk of discovery because of their lack of discretion. In order to emphasize this point, Douglass uses parallelism, as, for instance, in the following passage:
They do nothing towards enlightening the slave, whilst they do much towards enlightening the master.
Frederick Douglass also emphasizes the fear of detection that he experiences even after reaching freedom, demonstrating yet another condition of his newfound freedom. He describes his fear as a fugitive slave by suggesting that a person can only understand this condition by being in it himself. Douglass describes these feelings with broken sentences:
Let him be a fugitive slave in a strange land--a land given up to be the hunting-ground for slaveholders--whose inhabitants are legalized kidnappers--where he is every moment subjected to the terrible liability of being seized upon by his fellowmen....
The broken quality of these sentences reflects how Douglass feels. As he heals under the auspices of Mr. Johnson, who pays his travel aid and suggests his new last name, Douglass begins to become whole again and his narrative reflects this new confidence.
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