In the Narrative, Douglass acts as both the narrator and the protagonist, and he appears quite different in these two roles. The wide gulf between Douglass’s two personas is, in fact, the point of the Narrative: Douglass progresses from uneducated, oppressed slave to worldly and articulate political commentator. Douglass frequently dramatizes the difference between his older, more experienced self and his younger self through references to his relative ignorance and naïveté. One instance of this dramatization occurs when Douglass mocks how impressed he was as a young man to encounter the city of Annapolis—a city that now seems small to him by the standards of Northern industrial cities.