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Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death

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In the story “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe, it shows a prince trying to hide from a plague in his castle with the rest of the royals. In the castle there are seven rooms that are lit in different colors, each room to the readers mean something or have a meaning. Some say that the rooms mean nothing and are just colors that were choosen, but if you look at Poe’s history and the struggles he went through then you will see that those colors do have a symbolic representation of his emotions. Every room in the castle is a representation of what Poe felt throughout his life and still did up to that point. Thoughout Poe’s life, he experiences much pain and sorrow, he saw the birth of new things in his life, but also saw death takes those things from him. He tells the readers in the story that the rooms are from east to west, this is also a represtation of life and death, with the east meaning an new beginning and the west meaning a end of things. All these rooms together represent the seven stages of life: birth, youth, adolesence, adult, old age, close to death, and death itself. Poe lived the first four stages, but he also felt and experienced the last three though his mother and lover. …show more content…

They show the continuous growth of life and the progression of a person, from a baby to the old person they will eventually become. These phases of our life are symbolised by the clock in the black room, it represents just how people view time. To many people time is a basic concept, an hour is just an hour; yet, do you ever notice all the seconds that go by? Before anyone notices, years go by and they are left wondering where it all went. The mask man travels through the rooms at a fast pace, showing just how fast life can go by. Death will always catch up to everyone, no one can hide from

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