In The Heroic Slave, his only work of fiction, Douglass feels as if he is searching for a way to use fiction for the purpose of witnessing the truths of enslaved people. He writes scenes that feel like they're from a stage play. The characters speak in lengthy soliloquies. There is nothing real about the encounters between characters. Coincidence plays a high part in plot movement. In spite of all these qualities The Heroic Slave is a moving read. Douglass's dignity and outrage both combine to elevate the language to an eloquence that marks all his writing. But I could almost feel Douglass's growing frustration with the constraints of fiction as he wrote. Because by writing "fiction" he is by definition writing something "not true," his writing about the horrors of slavery sometimes grows more insistent and melodramatic. I believe he discovered even as he wrote this book that fiction a less useful means for him to expose to readers the truth about slavery, and The Heroic Slave remained his only fictional work.
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