Douglass's Narrative operates within two fields: the United States and the Atlantic. The former demonstrates the degree to which the slave narrative as autobiography can be considered as representative in both form and content as the Franklinian template. Douglass's work incorporates elements of Northern and Southern literary convention, producing an American subjectivity that spans national and racial divides. In the Atlantic context, Douglass's travels and the overseas editions of his work link the issues of slavery and abolition into a transnational network of separate but interlocking agendas. These occupy, to a greater or lesser extent, the terrain of progressive liberal discourse, a terrain that includes the advancement of women's political agency, racial liberalism, British and American nationalism, evangelical mission, and hierarchies of religious affiliation.

Yet the interconnectedness of these agendas also illustrates the complexities of individual and group identity in the context of shifting, increasingly globalized networks of ethnicity, gender or political agency. The Narrative was progressively restructured by Douglass in the period following its initial publication, to the point where it became a key node in this diverse network. Other elements of his textual production during the period 1845–47, the letters to Garrison in particular, continued to build upon the project of self-fashioning initiated in the Narrative, specifically on the American element of that undertaking.