Picking Apart Poe: The Masque of The Red Death

Picking Apart Poe: The Masque of the Red Death

In the short story "The Masque of the Red Death" Edgar Allan Poe uses this story, as the speaker, of Prince Prospero and his close friends in order to express his frustration with Tuberculosis and help his audience become aware of how horrible and deadly it could be. Throughout this story to express his frustration clearly, Poe creates a tone of Horror through dark diction as he describes the fate of the group of friends. Edgar Allan Poe also used imagery in many different places in this short story but especially when describing the seventh room and the mysterious figure. Poe used the seventh room to symbolize the Red Death. For example, the black walls and lack of light shows that it is something dark and horrible and the fact that the windowpanes are red symbolizes the blood coming out from a victim's pores and red stains on their skin. Lastly, the clock inside the room symbolizes a victims ticking clock of life since this disease is a fast killer with no escaping death. Poe also uses irony in "The Marque of the Red Death", since Prince Prospero's name means prosperous, which is him main goal by locking himself and his friends in the Abbey, but by the end of the story Prince Prospero is far from prosperous since his plan backfired and he and his friends end up dead from the Red Death.