The Understated Narrator of The Masque of the Red Death
While the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" never appears in a scene, he is always on the scene. He reveals himself overtly only three times, and even then only as one who tells:
"But first let me tell of the rooms in which [the masquerade] was held." (485)
"And the music ceased, as I have told . . ." (488)
"In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted . . . " (489)
Yet as understated as this narrator is, he presents a cryptic puzzle. The problem is that while he has witnessed the fatal events inside Prince Prospero's sealed abbey and survives to tell the tale, we learn at the end that everyone within the abbey dies. The narrator's survival is therefore paradoxical. I shall get to the significance of the paradox presently, but first I would like to show why efforts to dismiss the paradox are unsatisfactory.
One possible reading of the narrator in "Red Death" is that Poe has simply been careless--that his inclusion of three first-person pronouns is casual and meaningless. (We might call this the default reading, implicit in most of the criticism on this story that is concerned with other issues entirely.) This easiest of all solutions to our point-of-view puzzle is also the least satisfying, when one considers Poe's usual extreme sensitivity to the position of his narrators. In fact, many of Poe's tales are arguably about their own existence after the death of their narrators.
For instance, "MS. Found in a Bottle" and "Shadow--A Parable" both purport to be written by narrators who are on the brink of death, and who will be dead by the time we read th...
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...rupt liquefaction of the dead man at the moment of his hypnotic awakening" (11). Characteristically, Poe gives liquefaction the last word, subverting his own subversion of death.
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Authors use various styles to tell their stories in order to appeal to the masses exceptionally well and pass the message across. These messages can be communicated through short stories, novels, poems, songs and other forms of literature. Through The Masque of the Red Death and The Raven, it is incredibly easy to get an understanding of Edgar Allen Poe as an author. Both works describe events that are melodramatic, evil and strange. It is also pertinent to appreciate the fact that strange plots and eerie atmospheres are considerably evident in the author’s writings. This paper compares and contrasts The Masque of the Red Death and The Raven and proves that the fear of uncertainty and death informs Edgar Allen Poe’s writings in the two works
Zapf, Hubert. “Entropic Imagination in Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’.” College Literature 16.3 (Fall 1989): p211-218. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 March 2012.
In 1842, Edgar Allen Poe releases is grotesque short story “The Mask of the Red Death: A Fantasy” in the Philadelphian magazine Graham 's Magazine. Poe later printed a revised this piece for the New York Broadway Journal in 1845, with the new and current name of “The Masque of the Red Death.” The classic tale of affluence and pestilence opens to the narcissistic and probably mad Prince Prospero distracting his chosen attendees from the “Red Death” plague currently ravaging his kingdom. The host and guests revel in the seven vivaciously sumptuous rooms; except for the last room adorned in black and scarlet, in which “there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.” The only continuous presence in this sinister
New York: A.C. Armstrong & Son., 1884. xv-xxvi. EPUB file. Sova, Dawn B. "Poe, Edgar Allan.
Throughout the short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe uses vivid symbolism, structure, and reoccurring details to paint a powerful image regarding the finality and inescapable reaches of death itself. “The ‘Red Death’ has long devastated the country,” yet the Prince Prospero continues to hold extravagant parties for his fellow elite members of society. Rather than merely telling a series of events, Poe carries his readers throughout the many rooms and scenes that hold the Prince’s masquerade, up until the clock strikes midnight and the partygoers can no longer hide behind their façade, and death comes in to take those that thought themselves invincible (Poe 438-442).
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1. "My happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to an end. It is the end."
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Over the course of history, death has played a very integral part in literature, art, and human life in general. Portrayed by any in a very wide array of styles and techniques, one overarching theme that usually comes along with the use of death is the very simple, yet very existential one; “no man escapes death.” This theme is very apparent in the short story The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. The work is about a strange “plague” that has been overcoming the kingdom of a prince known as Prospero, a prince with a rather ironic and unfortunate name, whom rather than addressing the issue of this plague, decided to isolate himself in his kingdom and “escape” this death that
The idea of death is a thought the scares many, from those who have lived the course of their life to those who are just merely starting it. With the fear that consumes each person comes the will to try and escape the long claws of death, though no matter whom one is, death is inevitable. The short story, “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe, gives the theme that no one is capable of escaping death through the use of plot, symbolism, and narration. The story takes place during the dark ages where a bubonic plague, which causes sharp pains, sudden dizziness, and profuse bleeding at the pores, was claiming many lives. The Prince Prospero, wanting to outlive this horrid plague, locked himself away along with 1,000 others from his court.
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1941. Internet.