What Is The Tone In The Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the world’s most recognized authors. He is considered to be one of the fathers of the horror and detective genres, as the majority of his works often contain dark and mysterious themes. Out of the many sinister themes Poe has used in his publications, some of the most popular are death, horror, and human flaw. Poe’s depictions of these themes are greatly enhanced by his creative use of tone. This use of tone is found especially in his works, “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Black Cat.” In many of Poe’s stories, death is a common theme. In, “The Masque of the Red Death,” a masked creature, representing the Red Death (Tuberculosis), invades a castle meant to protect people from

The Red Death murders all in the castle, leaving nothing but a stopped ebony clock in a black room with blood-red windows. His use of tone in this story enhances the use of this theme with the specific words chosen to describe the Red Death and the demises of it’s victims. He describes the disease, saying, “Blood was its Avatar and its seal- the redness and the horror of blood.” The chilling use description of blood in that excerpt depicts the disease and murder in such a specific and precisely horrific way. Foreseeably, death also happens to be a main theme in another of Poe’s publications, “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which the narrator lures a naive and unsuspecting “friend” into catacombs beneath the city, under the pretense of a barrel of Amontillado to be critiqued, only to chain him and build a wall, sealing him into an early tomb to suffocate. His tone in this story also augments the cruelty of Fortunato's gruesome fate, “A succession of loud and shrill screams… I re-echoed… I did his, and he clamourer grew still.” Fortunato’s struggle continues, Poe using nothing other than back and forth dialogue between Fortunato and the narrator to describe his last moments, “ ‘For the love of God,