12 Years A Slave Compare And Contrast Essay

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Twelve Years a Slave is an autobiography, written by Solomon Northup, about his time as a slave in the south. Northup was a freedman living in New York that was kidnapped and sold into slavery, as state in which he remained for, as the title suggests, twelve years. This heartbreaking true story was adapted for the silver screen and became the award winning, 2013 film, 12 Years a Slave. Numerous changes, major and minor, were made when the text was turned into a screenplay. The order of the plot was rearranged, large portions of the story were missing, and characters were removed, but when all of this was over, the final product was a polished version of the book with a reasonable run time. 12 Years a Slave accurately captured the essence of Solomon Northup’s life, making the film History with a Hollywood flair. Of the many things that differ between the text and the film, there were some edits that…show more content…
The key events where all there, and though minor details changed to add to the drama, they remained fairly accurate to Solomon’s life. They depicted his kidnapping exactly how it happened in his autobiography. As described on pages 16 to 18 in Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon had fallen ill after having dinner with Hamilton and Brown while in Washington. He recalled the men entering his room and saying he needed to see a doctor. At this point in the movie, the two white men were seen escorting Solomon, sick as he was, down a dark alley. Then, just as told in his book, he woke up in chains, in a dark “dungeon”, without his free papers. The entirety of his imprisonment at Burch’s slave pen in Washington D.C. was accurate. Another key element that was left unaltered was the characterization and involvement of Bass, the man that was ultimately responsible for saving Solomon. Everything from the way he argued with Edwin Epps over slavery, to his conversations with Solomon, reflected the

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