Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death

The Masque of the Red Death
The author’s message in The Masque of the Red Death,is that you can’t escape death. He conveys this message through his descriptive writing and the mood he sets. He built gates to keep out the disease from entering his kingdom. He had his people build, “A strong and lofty wall” with “... gates of iron.”. He believed that, “the external world would take care of itself.” (36), so he wanted more safety for himself than for his subjects. Later in the story, Poe writes about the apartments in the prince’s house. There were seven apartments with different colors. The first was, “blue - and vividly blue were its windows”, the second was, “purple in its ornaments and tapestries”, the third was, “ green throughout”, the

fourth was, “furnished and lighted with orange”, “the fifth with white”, “the sixth with violet”, and the seventh was, “ shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls…” (37). The apartments’ colors get darker until the end is just black. Something's going to happen in those chambers because they have to be significant to the prince to be in the story.
In the last apartment there was, “...a gigantic clock of ebony...” (38) that banged every hour and they stayed, “silent [to] save the voice of the clock” (29) because the sound gave a “dull, heavy, monotonous clang.” (38) The clock was really loud and people truly loved the sound that it made.

It was so enchanting that everyone wanted to be quiet and just sit and listen to the way it sounded. The, “Prince Prospero… with rage and the shame of his own cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers” and, “ none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all”(42). In the last apartment was when the Prince decided to attack with a “dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity” (43), but in the end “the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet… [and] fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero.” (42-43) The Prince was trying to attack the person that was threatening them, the disease, but failed to do so. He himself ended up dying. The chambers held significance to the prince because he went through all of the colors, stages, of the chambers, sickness, and ended in the black apartment, which symbolizes death. Death or evil is always symbolized with the color red or black and the last apartment had the both of those colors.The people who were too scared to follow the Prince ended up revealing themselves through surprise. The, “revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment” and they “gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave

cerements and corpse-like mask”(43). They were scared of how the prince turned out from the disease. He died a horrible death and when he died, he looked nasty.They then realized that, “the presence of the Red Death”. They knew he came in, “like a thief in the night” and “one by one dropped the revellers in the blood- bedewed halls”. In the end of the story, the clock comes back. The clock, “went out with that of the last of the gay”.(43) The clock went off for the last time when everyone was dead. The clock marked the end of time, time being the death of the prince and the revellers. In conlusion, the prince tried to escape from the Red Death, butin the end, death caught up to him; he couldn’t escape it. He died the same way he “believed” his subjects would recover from.