Richard Cory We Wear The Mask Analysis

When selecting certain themes from American literature we run into similarities in common stories. When reading “Richard Cory” and “We Wear the Mask” we run into very similar themes, masks obviously. Themes sometimes overlap in stories any story from any time we can see that the themes define the story are the soul. The many short texts I’ve recently read have been set in America in the time after the civil war, with racism. Do we really hide who we are? The poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar has the theme that people wear metaphorical masks to hide our troubles or even to hide from society. Hiding these troubles could easily be hid by putting a smile on our faces, doing these things hide who we really are. The purpose of a mask is to hide our faces and a metaphorical mask might as well do the same. People after the civil war needed someone to blame for all the deaths, so they blamed the emancipated slaves, which could have easily be defined as racism. Blaming the African Americans had a sort of side effect in which they put on metaphorical masks, and there for it was written by Paul Laurence Dunbar in his short poem “We Wear the Mask.” Another poem with a similar theme would be “Richard Cory” by the author Edwin Arlington Robinson, about a man Richard Cory and the people’s description of him. In the poem he dies at the
I have seen many stories where the characters hide their true emotions afraid of what would happen if they let them free, like when the two characters love each other. Sometimes eventually the masks come off and the true and raw characters are seen for who they really are. What would happen if we were to take off our masks every single human on the planet today, would it be chaotic or