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We Wear A Mask Hyperbole

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Trinity Cooper Robin Gore English III 27 April 2023 Racism is a type of evil Racism is a sort of evil that has affected societies for ages and continues to do so now. Racism appears in 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 they were afraid their slave owners would retaliate. He was able to help …show more content…

Masks are worn by individuals to cover part or all of their faces, usually as a disguise. This quote illustrates how people disguise their true feelings by wearing masks with grins. In actuality, he is not referring to a physical mask; he uses the mask to symbolize hiding their true feelings from the outer world, as a strategy to protect oneself from others. A rhetorical device Dunbar uses is hyperbole, which can be seen in the line "With torn and bleeding hearts we smile." (Dunbar p.654). People's hearts aren't literally torn and bleeding. That was Dunbar's way of emphasizing that even in the midst of their pain and suffering, they continue to smile. Cooper 2 Through his autobiography, From My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass was able to demonstrate his struggle for freedom and independence against racism and slavery through different literary devices. He uses the literary device of conflict in this quote “Mrs. Auld was an apt woman, and the advice of her husband, and her own experience, soon demonstrated, to her entire satisfaction, that education and slavery are incompatible with each other.” (Douglass

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