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Dunbar's 'We Wear The Mask'

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Recommended: We wear the mask by Paurl Laurence Dunbar analysis

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” is said multiple times. It is said 3 times and takes up about 20% of the poem. The first and ending line is this statement. It also ends the middle stanza. This pattern is called Dunbar used this pattern to get his point across. His point is to prove that at the beginning and in the end, everyone still …show more content…

The purpose of this pattern is for the rhyming to not be perfect. It shows that the world is not perfect and that people wearing the mask always try to be perfect. Dunbar wants people wearing the mask to realize that they don't have to be perfect all of the time. People hide their emotions to make them appear perfect, but Dunbar is trying to undo that. Dunbar uses words like torture, tears, lies, and sighs to show the hate in the world. These are called pain words. Since the world is not perfect, there is hate in the world and lots of pain. People will never get rid of it because it isn't possible. Dunbar relates this to his purpose by hiding the emotions with the hurtful words. The poem has many happy words. Happy words like smile and heart. People like to smile and everyone has a heart. People love laughing and that's what the world needs. The world needs laughter to balance out the anger. There is too much evil and hate in the world, but smiling and laughing makes the world seem better. Dunbar uses this happiness to relate to the emotions we hide behind our

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