The art of literature has developed of the years of time. There are some works of literature such as legends, myths, and biographies including autobiographies that glorify the aspects of the past and are considered to be the guide of the future. Authors like William Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, and Edgar Allen Poe use characterization through action to give the reader a sense of reality as to what the characters dealt with throughout the text. Frederick Douglass in the autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and the Arab prisoner in The Guest are two different works of literature that were written over one hundred years apart. They are both similar and different in some ways, but both of them through their actions allow us as readers to read between the lines of the text to apply the same strategies from the text into our own personal lives.
Also, throughout each of the texts the characters were both held against their own will. Douglass was forced into his imprisonment in which he was held as a slave from the time he was born. According to Douglass, infants whose parents were enslaved were taken away from their mothers at a very early age. Specifically, in the text it clearly states “…before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old women, too old for field labor.”(pg.10) Likewise, children of today’s society are not taken as slaves, but may be placed in foster care against their own will by order of a court or because their parents are willing to have them cared for temporarily outside the home. On the other hand, the Arab prisoner was held against his own will because of criminal activity and was on the run from authorities and was somehow caught and imprisoned. In particular, in the text the French Algerian