Drive
Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The
shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn
to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who
must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone,
or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and
Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with
second-sight in this American world,-a world which yields him no true self-
consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other
world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his
twoness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone
keeps it from being torn asunder.
How does Du Bois's use of repetition and duality reinforce his experiences with
"
double-consciousness"?