Some people in high school are pretending to be at a big masquerade party. They wear masks pretending to be someone different from who they really are, and convince the people around them to see there mask as their true self. Many of the teenagers in the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes wore masks to hide who they really were. The students revealed their true identities and how they felt by writing and performing poetry on Open Mike Fridays in their English class. The main character, Tyrone Bittings, is a judgmental, confident, observant teen that reveals who he truly is through learning and listening to poetry.
He wants people to avoid thinking that developing only one true self identity is healthy. A mask allows an individual to see his or her full potential by not having a true identity. Masks have multiple identities based on the certain situations and environments (circumstances) the person is having(undergoing). I agree with Gergens interpretation (assertion) and his psychological
“Masks” by Shel Silverstein is a deceptively simple poem. The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABCBDDED, and has a regular rhythm. The lines alternate rhythms, the first line is hard/soft/hard/soft, and the second is soft/hard/soft/hard. This alternating pattern continues throughout the poem. Though the reader might expect “Masks” to have a regular rhyme in addition to the rhythm, the rhyme scheme is not as consistent.
In his famous Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, the president of the United States at that time, uses repetition and allusion to draw light to the importance and meaning of the situation, and the need for more people to rise up and fight for America. Lincoln begins using allusion, by referring back to America’s founding fathers, and the morals they implied with the idea that “all men are created equal”. Lincoln uses this to express the idea that this civil war was made off of ideas that go against American belief. He then speaks of the men who have given their lives to this war, and how his speech will be forgotten, but nothing he can say could compare to the importance and bravery of these men. “The world will little note, nor long
Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, "We Wear the Mask," delivers a poignant message in fifteen brief lines. On one hand, the poem pays tribute to the historical struggles of African-Americans. Specifically, Dunbar explores the thought that many African-Americans disguised their true feelings during the racially tumultuous period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. His moving words suggest that the African-American community of this time often wore "the mask that grins and lies" to avoid drawing unwanted attention to themselves.
Such personification mirrors Dunbar’s use of figurative language, which relates the poems in more ways than one. Dunbar touches on human features such as cheeks and eyes in his poem but also uses a spiritual element to advance his point of view. Furthermore, “We Wear the Mask” was written in 1896; a period in American history that was post-slavery but still had widespread discrimination. The spiritual connotation within Dunbar’s poem can allude to African American churches and/or the hymns slaves sung on plantations. Nevertheless, the struggle of African Americans is a symbol of both presented
In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask” the speaker wears a mask to hide his internal suffering because he does not want the rest of the world to think he is weak. This poem relates the prejudice black people face against white people. The speaker starts the poem with the lines, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” (1). Here he describes the kind of “masks” that he wears.
The mask is the hard shell that young men are expected to face the world with. They are expected to show only their best selves and hide their insecurities and worries. The mask is incredibly relatable to the social construction of gender, because it was created through the social construction of gender. Young males would not need to create a mask and live behind it if society didn 't force them too.
He utilizes the mask when he says that “I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford…” (Fitzgerald ##). He wants everyone including Nick Carraway, the narrator, to know that he is a valuable and worthy person. However, it backfires when Nick Carraway says “I knew why
The themes that are portrayed by the veil reveals, the tension between the minister and the community. Every person has something to hide from the world, the veil is symbolic for the cover up of the people’s secrets. Although most people would not wear a veil to hide their secrets from others, the minister is proving a point. By wearing a simple black veil Mr. Hooper is making all the villagers evaluate their everyday actions closely. The symbolic value of the black veil creates a dilemma that it between the minister and his environment, and the guilt that the veil also conveys.
Freedom of self-expression, imagery, and silence are three themes that both: the story “Jacob’s Chicken” by Milos Macourek and the poem “Poetry” by Nikki Giovanni clearly illustrate to the readers. Both works describe the significance of self-expression and the sequent immediate criticism that comes right after one tries to use imagination and stand out or be a different individual. The authors of both forms of literature send the readers a message about the importance of silence- versus what nowadays is more often if not solely to be witnessed, physical talk. Both works express a feeling of an ongoing deficiency of freedom to express oneself in one’s society and a feeling of irony and aggression towards the most common belief of always “going with the flow” and pre-conception that everything has to be alike or else it is weird, unneeded, or just doesn’t belong in a society.
The novel “The Baddest Dog in Harlem” is written by the author Walter Deans Myers, who is an Afro-American writer. It was published in 2001 as a part of the collection “145th street: short stories” and is a nonfiction short story. Throughout the novel we are not shared with a lot of information about the main character nor the other characters we come across in the novel. The main character, also the narrator in the novel, is a black male, whose name remains unknown.
War. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. This a song lyric from a song called War written by Edwin Starr. In this song he talks about the horrors of war and the meaninglessness of everyone's deaths.
Although his writing can be engaged to an audience who reads the situation the boy is encountering with his neighbors ,but to analyze themselves instead of another person. Therefore the intended purpose of this writing is to not analyze or criticize how a person live, but to analyze themselves , as they could be living their life differently such as being greedy. ”You should look at yourself. I mean really look at yourself ” .Therefore the author notifies the audience of the situation he was in throughout his life,through the use of emotional appeal using personal experiences in his life and humor
“We Wear the mask that grins and lies/ It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--/” (Dunbar p.243). The “we” in this case would be referring to black Americans of the time. Masks are used as cyphers for cloaks and dishonesty. Here the mask represent more than just a dress-up image.
