Fight Or Flight. In The Comic, The Private Eye By Brian

The poem We Wear the Masks by Paul Dunbar is an example of how people hide their feelings due to what others think of them. Like in the book To Kill a Mockingbird, the colored people in town are stereotyped due to their color and looks. The poem states, “We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes” (Dunbar). When people are stereotyped they hide their feelings to make others happy. Wearing the mask is a symbol of how people cover themselves to get away from their feelings.

Throughout the essay “Our secret” by Susan Griffin, Griffin talks about a few characters’ fears, secrets and she gives us insights into these “secrets”. Griffin comes to realize her own secrets and fears by examining others. She relates to a few of the characters such as Himmler, Leo, Helene and everyone else even though she is different than all of them. The only thing that all of these characters have in common is that they all represent human emotion. Susan Griffin reveals that everyone has a hidden side to them and anything being showed on the outside could be fake or a false representation of themselves. “I think of it now as a kind of mask, not an animated mask that expresses the essence of an inner truth, but a mask that falls like dead weight over the human face.” (Griffin 237) This quote explains what she means about secrets being the barrier to others’ feelings and having this mask hides what you really feel on the inside.

Determined to find exactly what altered masks can do to an identity, an experiment involving 18 female college students and a clinical trainee was conducted. Gergen’s intentions were to “find the factors of an individual’s choice

Masks portray a sense of mystery. “No one could see me clearly. No one could see my face.” Lucy, Grealy. Masks. Print. The unknown is often intriguing. Generally their worn to portray a character or someone other than yourself and symbolize an imaginary life. For Lucy, it portrayed a sense of freedom. The freedom from being stared at, teased, lonely, and occasionally envious of others. Halloween is the only day that Lucy experience’s an ordinary life. Unlike the majority of other days’ mask are customary and her disability is masked. Providing her with the confidence to express herself freely by asking questions and making comments. “Studies show children with disabilities are two to three times more likely to be bullied than their non-disabled

Rosen portrays our society as completely exposed, giving up all privacy to join, and fit in with the “naked crowd”. Rosen claims that we willing give up all power of privacy in order to fit in with society and be accepted as someone that can be trusted through exposure. He claims that image is the key to establishing trust, not through a relationship or conversation. His thesis presents his views on the subject, “has led us to value exposure over privacy? Why, in short, are we so eager to become members of the Naked Crowd, in which we have the illusion of belonging only when we are exposed?”(Rosen) he states that we value exposure over privacy, and will give away privacy to fit in.

“Like circus performers, we smear on makeup to become someone else. Far beyond applying a little lip gloss or hair dye, our mask attempts to cover up who we really are. Our mask attempts to cover up who we really are […] what we’ve been through, what we know to be important, and what we are afraid to share with others”. (O’Leary, 36) John O’Leary focuses heavily on the concept of taking off our masks in his inspirational book, On Fire: The 7 Choices to Ignite a Radically Inspired Life. What O’Leary means by this analogy is that we should all break the barriers which we have erected to protect ourselves from the world, walls that were built after being hurt, experiencing something traumatic, or perhaps after being betrayed. However, such walls oftentimes do not benefit ourselves in the way that we may wish. Instead, more often than not, our masks do the opposite, and they isolate us from what we as humans need most: friendship, companionship, and love.

The government is able to force the citizens to keep their masks continually through propaganda. The main character Fles, as well as all of the other members of society, believe that if they see their real faces, instant death would overcome them. Fles was hopping on rocks near the river when he tripped, sending his mask off his face. When he peered into the water, Fles was dumbfounded to not die and flabbergasted to see that he was beautiful. He ecstatically ran into the establishment, his town, to show the world what was behind the masks, but to everyone else, Fles’s actions were unheard of and completely abhorrent. Before the establishment members killed him, “Fles’s eyes pleaded with them, yet the only thing they saw in his eyes was the intent of harm, not help.”(Unknown, 3) This quote shows the use of equality by force because the people in Fles’s establishment are so afraid of the consequences set in place by the government that Fles’s aberrant behavior was worth killing him. The threat Fles proposed seemed greater than the death of one person. Overall, the self-preservation the townspeople used against Fles is explained by the government’s use of propaganda which is obtained by equality by

Masks are a covering for parts of the face that are worn for a disguise, pleasure, or to scare people. Greek theatre utilizes masks innumerable times for evident characters in their plays. The actors/actresses who position their masks on, become divergent people. The denotation the boys’ have behind the mask is unique from when they have the mask off. In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the mask is used as a disguise from their normal society and civilization. Jack, Ralph and Roger prove that this statement is true throughout the novel. Golding once said that civilization is “the mask which enables the individual to hide his primitive nature.” This illustrates how one will disguise himself as someone or something that triggers their primal nature. William Golding’s purpose in writing this novel is to present to the readers when an individual loses connections with society they can regenerate one's true self to become someone they are not. The masks are utilized by these three characters to shield their nefarious doings. Jack, Ralph and Roger all have measures that delineate the diabolic and shadow within all humanity.

A mask can do a lot to a person, change them in different ways. How they act, is one of them and how people look at them is another. People would be curious and or would not want him to take it off, meaning people would bully August into wearing a mask, How they act, if they feel weird with how they look, covering their faces helps with that, August said that he felt more comfortable with it on even if people still looked at

masks. All the mask that one possesses changes their behavior and in turn, adds to their

Mask Many people tend to put on a “mask” to hide their true self. People will act differently to fit in or acquire something. A mask allows for a person to hide their true self and often times helps people deceive others. In the play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth put on a mask to hide her cruel, manipulative, and greedy self.

In We Wear the Mask, the author’s purpose is to push the reader to feel something about the way things were in his perspective.

Their masks hide the evil dwelling within their innocent souls, waiting to be set free. It emits human personalities and behaviors, allowing it to be impenetrable by visual perception. With these masks as a cover, Jack and his tribe members interact nicely; chaos rips through their society when they allowed their masks to fall off throughout many sequences of events.

In V for Vendetta the James McTeigue film and Novel from George Orwell depicted on a masked vigilante ¨aka V¨ takes up arms using terrorist acts against a fascist government that abuses privacy and shows a dictatorship type government that rules against the people that live in this society. The masked man ¨V¨ What the author is trying to warn about the misuse of technology in this film and novel is that Privacy is an aspect of life that is abused, and violated. He thinks that one’s right to privacy is viewed as the ability to keep aspects and tangents of life close to one’s self.

Simmel (1950) illustrates the stranger as a obscured figure hiding in the shadows. There is a self/other dichotomy surrounding the 'Other'. Simmel states how "strangers are not really conceived as individuals [...]" (1950: 407), further illustrating how the 'Other' is envisaged as almost non human. One way in which this is visualised within The Strangers is through the use of masks. To say that these masks act as a criminal countermeasure does not explain why these strangers wear them.