In the literary readings, If We Must Die by Claude McKay and We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar, they share the similar concept of hiding the pain and fear from your oppressor. Dunbar said, “We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries/ To Thee from tortured souls arise” (Dunbar p.243). Here he is speaking of how much of the pain and suffering him and others went through while they was born into the slave world. In McKay’s piece, you image a troop of drained combatants sitting on the ground. Their

several ways, including prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes. The Stories We Wear a Mask and From My Bondage and My Freedom shows how racism not only affects African Americans it also affects others. In the poem “We Wear a Mask” Paul Dunbar uses symbolism, and hyperboles to express his message. Douglass uses conflict to convey his message in the autobiography From My Bondage and My Freedom. In the poem "We Wear a Mask" Dunbar expresses how African American slaves suppressed their feelings because

doubtful that there are any human beings on Earth that have not donned a mask of some sort. Some masks come in the form of the very clothes we wear, while others may be as intangible as our self-presentation. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies details the story of how one group of British boys establishes a civilization on a desert island only to watch it fall apart due to infighting and savagery; it is essentially a study of masks and how they influence human behavior and identity, ultimately resulting

201B 29 March 2023 The Making of the Mask In psychology ‘masking’ is the act of protecting oneself from social rejection. This goal is achieved through meticulous displays of etiquette, social capitulation, and imitation. Author Paul Lawrence Dunbar represents this continuous act of concealment as a literal mask in his 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask”. The poem deftly illustrates the struggles and triumphs of African-Americans who’ve been forced to “..wear the mask” (1) in response to oppression across

We Wear the Mask Analysis In the popular Disney movie Frozen one if the Characters constantly repeated, “Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know” (Frozen), the character’s kingdom and even her sister never caught on that anything was wrong. In Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s somber poem “We Wear the Mask” utilizes repetition, strong diction, and stanza structure in order to convey that there is more to a person that is visible to others. Dunbar uses repetition to display the people of the poem, and what

with certain people than when they are alone. Some will call this act a “mask.” This metaphor is used because people cover up who they truly are or what they really feel with their actions; similar to the way a mask covers up a person’s face. This idea of a mask is explored in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” and readers can see examples of “masks” in Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. People often wear masks to hide something about themselves that they are not proud of or hide

In We Wear the Mask, the author’s rhetorical purpose is to teach the reader why people hide behind their emotions. Dunbar states in the poem that “We wear the mask”, but what mask? What are ‘we’ hiding from? Dunbar explains that we (everyone) are hiding our feelings about one another. He is trying to make the reader realize what people are hiding from everyone else. To show this, Dunbar uses many different rhetorical patterns throughout his poem. While reading the poem, “We wear the mask”

poem, We Wear The Mask By Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the poem, We Wear The Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Erik Erikson's theory of Psychosocial Development is shown through African Americans trying to fit in, in a racist society. Throughout the poem, We Wear The Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Dunbar shows to the readers that the character is struggling with their identity, this struggle connects to Erik Erikson's crisis of “Identity vs Role Confusion”. In the poem, the author states “We wear the mask