Interesting Fact Though the author of Incidents in the Life of a slave girl is generally categorized as non-fiction today, some critics dismiss the work as a fictionalized and exaggerated narrative on the grounds that the book did not acknowledge Harriet Jacob as the author unlike other slave narratives. Another point that these critics refer to is that the story of a woman spending seven years in the extremely narrow attic (the picture above) to escape from her master is far from realistic. Though the controversy remains until today, Incidents in the life of a slave girl has no doubt clouted an impactful influence on public's awareness of the struggles that slaves had to go through everyday.
While people’s search for the meaning of life is subject to implicit impediments created by the convoluted characteristics of life and humans’ propensity to excessively preoccupy their minds with goals, often it is explicitly restricted by societal expectation and setting. For example, Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 attempts to find a deeper meaning of life by defying to follow the societal convention of disregarding the values of books and leading hedonistic lifestyles. Though he strives to enlighten people with the importance that book and love hold in their lives, he fails to do so since the government propagandized people into believing that books contain harmful ideas and thus must be avoided at all cost. Had the government not banned people from reading books, he might have discovered valuable hints of what life could possibly mean. Similarly, Linda in Incidents in the Life of a slave girl demonstrates how society thwarts one's quest for meaning. Refusing to passively adhere to society that accepts racial discrimination and oppression, Linda endeavors to overcome restrictions that the slavery system of the Southern America places on her and her children’ s lives by actively fighting against injustices that Dr. Flint constantly commits in the book. Instead of actively searching for the significance of life, she had to spend most of her lifetime striving to extricate herself from shackles of slavery, the considerable amount of time that could have offered her more variegated experience than hiding in the small attic. Apartheid policies in South Africa is another example that illustrates how the unjustifiable discrimination that society imposes on certain group of people impedes the exploration for the significance of life. The racial segregation legitimized by the apartheid policies made it impossible for the colored to investigate the values of life since the apartheid policies had been so deeply permeated through the entire South Africa that people did not see any moral infraction in oppressing human privileges of the blacks to lead meaningful lives. The violation of basic civil rights of the black deprived the black of opportunities to search for the significance of life by prohibiting them to enjoy certain privileges they have definitely deserved as humans.