Both books are conversion narratives in the slave-narrative tradition: a man who has been made into something by a system describes the making, then describes the moment he stopped accepting it, and the second half is written by a different person from the first. The literacy scene is the shared hinge. Douglass teaches himself to read in defiance of a master who says it will ruin him; Malcolm X copies out a dictionary word by word in prison. Both present reading as the act that made political thought possible, and both were written as arguments rather than as memoirs.