Symbolism In Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe’s use of symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death” creates a

Imagine dancing through the colorful stages of life, birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and such. However, as you progress through life, you can never shake a sense of foreboding lurking behind you. Suddenly, deep, dark, death devours you. Death, everyone faces it eventually. In the story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, by Edgar Allan Poe, the theme is, “You cannot avoid death.” Poe develops the theme by using many different symbols throughout the story.

In the beginning of this story it talked about the “Red Death” that was happening around the kingdom and killing people within an half an hour it was insidious. The “Red Death” was a disease that no one could off escaped from neither could the prince or the people inside the castle. “There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with

“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are best shadowly and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?” (Poe). There is no such thing as having the ability to predict or tame the wrath of death, for all we can do is learn to accept it. In the story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, the main character, Prospero, shows through his arrogant actions that death will forever overpower the human instinct to stay alive. Poe uses symbolism to convey the battle between man and nature through the idea of the masquerade that serves as a fortress against the wrath of the disease, an excuse to disguise the true colors of man, and the honest truth that man will never become immortal.

Whether people acknowledge it or not, most people’s greatest fear is death. In the short story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” by E. Poe, he shows how people were trying to escape death, but may not see what was to come. Early in the story, Prince Prospero and his friends were trying to escape the red death. With this, the Prince throws a masquerade. Instead of seeing what was right in front of them, they were too caught up in things that they could not see. To strengthen his allegory of life in “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe expresses that avoiding something does not make it go away through his portrayal of the castle, the courtiers, and rooms one and seven.

In The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero tries to cover the fact that people are dying beyond his walls by throwing an everlasting party. His egocentric and uncharitable traits are shown in this quote: “And the whole seizure, progress, and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour. But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious… He summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court…” (Poe 3) Situational irony is applied in this quote. As people are suffering outside his walls, the main character is throwing a social function trying to mask the lethal contagion spreading all over the country. To further support the theme, “And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He has come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their

Everyone fears their own death, thus why some people will do anything to escape it. In Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, this fear is experienced by all. In the story, a prince named Prospero and his people try to elude the Red Death through seclusion and isolation in the prince's abbey. However, no walls can stop death since it is unavoidable and inescapable. Throughout the story, Poe uses symbols such as the rooms, the masked figure, and the clock to convey the theme that no one can escape death.

Death is the only thing that time doesn’t run out of. It’s inescapable everybody dies, every human goes through. Edgar Allan Poe often explored death in his stories. In Poe’s “ The Masque of the Red Death,” he uses symbols to convey hidden messages to show that there is no running from the inevitable like death.

The Black Death, also known as The Red Death, killed over sixty percent of Europe’s population. “The Masque of the Red Death”, written by Edgar Allan Poe, is about wealth and privilege, where the prince hides from the Red Death with his revelers. Poe uses symbols such as setting, objects, along with characters to reveal an allegorical theme. Thus being the theme, everyone will perish, even the wealthy and privileged.

In “the Masque of the Red Death” Edgar Allan poe uses his mastery of literary techniques like imagery and symbolism to create allegories, an allegory is a story that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one, this can also be put to poems and pictures, but we are here to talk about what the meaning of “The Masque of the Red Death” is. And that is, death comes for us all whether you fight it or hide from it. Incase you who haven’t red “The Masque of the Red Death” it is about a prince named Prince Prospero who tries to outlast the plague in a castle where he invites a thousand of his friends to outlast the plague with him it works… for a while. Six months later he held a big masquerade ball for all his

Humans can attempt to escape the inevitability of death, but in the end, they are doomed to meet their fate. At first, people might think that they are invulnerable, but just when they think everything is all right, it all falls apart. In the “Masque of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe shows how Prince Prospero and his citizens try to avoid the inevitability of death. He and his subjects hide away in a safe room to avoid the plague or the “Red Death”. Poe uses symbolism in his short story to show that death is inevitable. He shows symbolism through different objects and characters. In the “Masque of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe portrays symbolism through the seven different colored rooms, the Red Death, and the giant, ebony clock.

As a horrible plague (the “Red Death”) devoured any one who stepped foot in its path, “Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless, and sagacious.” (Baym 2007) Prince Prospero invited one-thousand knights, dames, and the pecunious people to stay in his castle to escape the “Red Death”. This left the

The clock that was set at the masquerade party was simply a symbol for time. The clock tells time and was used as a symbol for it. The clock was there ticking as a reminder that time runs out. Time simply will eventually run out and it should be enjoyed, every second of it, because it is so precious and is limited. According to Hubert Zapf, “In the striking of the hours [the clock] which dictates the rhythm and the festivities, time, like space, is made conscious not only as a consitutive [sic] category of narrative fiction, but as an existential manifestation of a principle which consumes itself and which, as such, is built into the events of the masque as their structuring law” (47). Zapf is trying to explain that the clock was present at the ball as a reminder that times supply would eventually come to an end. The clock didn’t necessarily symbolize death, but otherwise was seen as a symbol to remind that time does run out and every minute of it should be enjoyed. “But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly...and made whispering vows, to each other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes...there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before” (Poe 2). Poe meant with this that people do not always realize time is going to eventually run out until they are reminded. Everyone ever so often is reminded that death does in fact exist. For example, when a family suffers a loss of someone dear to the family, they suddenly are reminded of deaths existence and how it is inevitable and appears to come out of nowhere and how someone’s time will eventually run out. The clock chiming at the ball is relative to this example in the fact that the clock was a reminder of death or time running out. Whenever the guests

The hidden message in Poe’s “ The Masque of the Red Death,” reveals that people can’t hide from death because it will

No matter how vigorously one tries to fight off death, it is inevitable and “all good things must come to an end”. In this case, death symbolizes the end of life. In “The Masque of the Red Death”, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, wealthy Prince Prospero hosts a magnificent masked ball with music, wine, and ballet dancers. Joyous guests dance and sing with the prince until a mysterious masked figure appears and spoils the fun. Prince Prospero and guests try to avoid the masked figure but are deemed unsuccessful. The masked figure is symbolic of the theme that death is inevitable and cannot be stopped because like death, the figure is essentially a part of everyone’s life and cannot be overpowered.