A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree "Licence en Langue et Littératures Anglaises".

RÉSUME,

This work sets out to examine symbolism in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass? An American Slave. It explores how Douglass employs the use of vivid language that enhance and portray the plight that African American slaves endured in America. Based on the hypothesis that the symbols of the North and the south are used by Douglass as locations that reveal meaning and move the plot forward, this work cheked the symbols that Douglass used to describe the South as a place of suffering while the North is a place of freedom. This work is written against the New Historicism theory propounded mainly by Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Althusser. Throughout this study, it has been revealed that Douglass' language was symbolic in order to emphasize his slavery experience in the South. Also, Douglass focuses on the linguistic significance of bondage: he briefly portrays masters and slaves almost solely in terms of their linguistic acts because, for himn, the reality of slavery is a profoundly rhetorical one. Baltimore has become his transitional place that opened his mind in learning. He descuses his own relentless progress to freedom as the acquisition of an ever deeper understanding of language use in a slave economy, and the realization of his own freedom at thye Nantucket ( North ) antislavery convention is preeminently a linguistic event. In this perpective, he also uses this language to fight against slavery and succeds to abolish it through language use. Recommendations are addressed to all human beings especially the black race to struggle for being literate in order to deciher all that happen in the world and claim for their own rights. Indeed, black people are recommended to no more accept exploitation by their fellow whites.