A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery

This chapter suggests that the slave narrative employs metonymy as an archive of memory when authors are unwilling or unable to articulate the experience of trauma explicitly. Drawing on Frederick Douglass’s use of the “blood-stained gate” metaphor as a repository for his emotional suffering, it describes how blood serves as a metonymic vehicle for communicating authenticity in narratives in which affective descriptions run counter to the ambitions of the genre. Ismael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Me