Cecile Pineda's existentialist novel Face (Wings Press) presents the opportunity to discuss human identity in both the natural and societal context.

After I finished reading Face, a quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alred Prurock" came to mind: "I prepare a face to meet the faces that I meet."

Is the human face one's true identity? Or is the face the mask that conceals the terrible, primal self within? Did the people loath the protagonist Cara because he had no face or because he was stripped of the mask? Did his grotesqueness evoke their primal memories of our evolutionary origins? Evolution, a firm, empirically sound fact---as true as the earth's roundness--is resisted and detested more than any other reality. Based on our morphology, our social habits, and our very DNA, we humans are a great ape. Our DNA sequencing reveals that there is less than a 3% diference between humans and chimpanezes.

When Cara's face/mask is stripped away, his neighbors reactions degenerate from disgust to animalistic violence. Did Cara subconsciously realize that his new, deformed face merely revealed the naked animal, stripped of its angelic illusions? Cara had to create a face---a mask---in order to rejoin the society of men. The face to meet the faces must meet.