In the preface to her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), Harriet Jacobs makes explicit her “desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition” of enslaved people (Jacobs n. pag.). The preface itself constructs an implied reader and gears their moral judgement towards condemning slavery. As is characteristic of the autobiographical genre, Jacobs’s narrative identifies her simultaneously as author, narrator, and protagonist. Thus, her “Preface by the Author” blurs the distinction between her textual status as narrator and her extratextual status as author. This conflation is key to constructing the implied reader of the narrative: the narrator does not address mere narratees but constructs the latter as real-life readers – women living in the Northern US – whose reading experience, the preface claims, could prompt a real-life sense of personal responsibility in the struggle against slavery. The rhetoric of the preface can be analyzed through the combined lenses of deictic theory and narrative ethics. Jacobs’s moral-ethical deixis includes markers like right/wrong, good/bad and true/false. Jacobs orients the implied reader towards Abolition, by instructing them to judge “Freedom” as good and “Slavery” as bad. Correspondingly, Jacobs associates slavery with “persecut[ion]” and “suffering” by presenting it as a “deep, and dark, and foul ... pit of abominations” (Jacobs n. pag.). This moral deictic system is solidified by Jacobs’s claim, as author-narrator, that to validate these ethical coordinates is to “realiz[e]” the truth (Jacobs n. pag.). The moral deixis of Jacobs’s preface is instrumental in constructing what James Phelan defines as “the ethics of the telling” and “the ethics of reading/reception” of the narrative (Phelan n. pag.). The invitation of the implied audience into Jacobs’s ethical perspective simultaneously assigns them “moral responsibilities” and “obligations” (Phelan n. pag.) vis-à-vis the diegesis and its narration