That reading took forever for me.

It is extremely important to the rhetoric of the novel for the book to be entirely truth written by the slave. The editor’s decision to minimally change language and content added an appeal to ethos and pathos that cannot be attained in an ordinary fictional piece. It is easy in other works, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to overlook the injustices of slavery as hyperbole and misinterpretation, but the stunning reality of reading the words straight from the slave’s mouth is incomparable in strength. A hypothetical situation is always rhetorically weaker then a personal interview, and this notion holds true in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. It was most disturbing throughout her incessant description of her master’s conquest to rid her of her decency. While the stories of the various torturous deaths were moving, they did not contribute the same effect because they were not from personal experience. The ability to know every itching thought that went thought the slave’s head as these cruelties were induced upon her offer an unparalleled effectiveness of rhetoric.