W.E.B Du Bois

There are a large variety of societies that have developed over the many generations that have dawned on our time on earth. There are societies that may provide its many civilians with comfort, sadness, joy, confusion, discomfort, or even discrimination. These societies vary from every region to region. They develop their characteristics from the many inhabitants that have come to populate the region in question. In “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois’s society was one filled with discrimination. The particular type of discrimination that W.E.B. Du Bois had to endure throughout his early, childhood, youthful years was the discrimination of those not willing to accept the fact that black-colored people of their generation were no longer considered as the Caucasian civilians’ slaves, but instead they were to be viewed as the Caucasian people’s equal partners in the harsh, difficult, troubling, anxiety inducing, and sometimes enjoyable game of life. Since authors are not always able to simply or easily explain their main points to the audience that their work of writing may attract, authors tend to utilize the rhetorical devices’ that have been created and provided for them by the many previous authors that have come before there time of life. Even though there is more than one form of rhetorical devices, W.E.B. Du Bois was able to make the decisions on what specific rhetorical devices would give W.E.B. Du Bois the best amount of assistance that he could have possibly needed or attained to help him interpret his main ideas and beliefs to his fellow audience members. One of the rhetorical devices that W.E.B Du Bois had finally chosen to utilize as a helper in his attempt to inform and ensure that no one in his audience would have to ever come to ponder what W.E.B Du Bois was trying to explain to them was tone. With W.E.B Du Bois using tone within his literary work, he was able to tell the literary work’s audience how he had come to feel about the world and its beliefs of him.
Tone is the interpretation of how an individual may be feeling at a certain time through one’s vocal characteristics. W.E.B Du Bois had to go through his young years of life with the darkening cloud of racial discrimination luring above his head every moment of his life. W.E.B. Du Bois was a black-colored man living in a white-colored world where slavery had seemed to have been only recently banned. The white-people of this time era also did not tend to prefer the national decision of the banning of slavery. Even though they had to learn to live with it, which did not mean that they had to come to learn to enjoy it. When W.E.B Du Bois was a boy of a young age, he was developed a liking for a certain white girl. He wanted to show the little white girl how much he really liked her. So, he decided on giving her a present from the true goodness of his heart. When he had accumulated a large enough amount of courage to go up and personally hand the gift her got for her to her, she resulted in declining his present to her without any consideration towards his feelings. She did so for only one exact reason. It was because he was born of black people meaning that he himself was also a black person. When the girl he had a major crush on had turned his gift down, he had felt disappointed and annoyed with how badly white-colored people chose to think about and treat black-colored people at the time. In order to interpret this thought of his to the audience, he used a tone that symbolized both disappointment and the feeling of being extremely annoyed with something. He stressed on the point of how the girl he was dreaming to be with had declined his gift of love with the simple fact and physical characteristic such as the darkness of his skin.
With W.E.B Du Bois using tone within his literary work, he was able to tell the literary work’s audience how he had come to feel about the world and its beliefs of him. This helped him show the world how he really felt about discrimination in his world.