A Road of Adjectives

I guess I must have been feeling humorous when I sat down the other day to fulfil my reading duties of Frederick Douglass's memoir because the contrasting seriousness of the tone was  so inescapably evident. Even so, I wouldn't go as far as to describe the book's tone as dry because the employment of picturesque adjectives splashes the otherwise grim prose with vividness.

Adjectives, fancy ones I must add, are Douglass's appeal to pathos. 

Douglass's descriptions of the sinister Mr. Gore are dense and powerful. He writes, "He was cruel enough to inflict the severest punishment, article enough to descend to the lowest trickery, and obdurate enough to be insensible to the voice of a reproving conscience." There are two adjectives for every noun in this sentence. The description is in the breach of wordiness, and yet the insistence in using adjectives serves to demonstrate Douglass's passion toward the subject. Each descriptive word is an argument of feelings. The reader must understand the severity of the affair. The reader must understand that adjectives are not placed at random to adorn the prose. Douglass employs adjectives with enthusiasm because it is the best way to portray the reality of the affair. If the reader is not moved by the text, there is not point in writing it at all. We could apply an AP Lang wordy sentence exercise and streak all of the passion from the sentence. Mr. Gore, after all, is just a cruel man. But then there is no point in immortalizing those events. Was the descriptive language not present, we might as well be reading a casualty record from the time, cold and meaningless.