Summary, Symbolism, and Allusion for Masque of the Red Death

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Kristy Everett Ms.Burns-6th PAP English-II 14 May, 2012 Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” is a short story about a prince who invites a thousand of his “lighthearted friends” to a masked ball, while the rest of his kingdom is dying from a plague. When the narrator describes seven different colored chambers in the prince’s castle, suddenly a stranger appears described as the Red Death. Prospero becomes angry that someone with such little humor would join his masque ball. At once the Prince orders the guest to remove his mask, but no one dares to go near him. The Prince then chases the stranger through six of the seven chambers, but when the masked stranger approaches and enters the seventh chamber, which is the black room, he falls dead upon the floor. The “lighthearted guests” remove the mask from the stranger and find nothing. One by one each of the prince’s guest and himself die as victims of the Red Death. Poe depicts death as an inescapable force by using allusion, symbolism, personification, and imagery. In the beginning Poe uses “Prince Prospero” as an allusion to The Tempest and the Bible. According to Cheney Prince Prospero becomes an anti-hero, as an image of a man misusing his will as he attempts to shape reality; the “Red Death” becomes an anti-Christ,” and image of the cosmic force conspiring man’s failure. Charmingly Prince Prospero’s masquerade does not intimately unite earth to heaven, but intimately unites earth to “death” (Cheney). In the end the masquerade is not a new Eden, but a “valley of the shadow of death” (Cheney). Poe uses many things to describe symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death”. He uses “the gigantic clock of ebony,” to symbolize the passing of Prince Prospero and his “light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court”. When the clock starts to chime and the “pendulum” starts to
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