The Clock In The Masque Of The Red Death

Have you ever imagined death? Imagine listening to a clock ticking down until it reaches your final hour. What if you didn’t know it was your final hour? How would you feel? Would you be nervous at every chime of the clock? I know I would. In the story, “Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allen Poe uses a clock as his suspense device. I believe that he chose it because clocks make people nervous and jittery. Every time a clock hand moves, you are an hour, a minute, a second, or even a millisecond closer to death. I inferred from the story that the clock is a symbol of death because it is in a dark, mysterious room, and people are afraid of the clock’s chimes. The clock is described as, “a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, …show more content…
Every time the clock chimed the people were frightened. They would stop what they were doing and stand in fear. “Musicians… were strained to pause… waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions… echoes had fully ceased,” (Poe 86). When the chiming stopped, people would go back to what they were doing with no trace of fear. “A light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled,” (Poe 86). In the story, it says, “the sounding of midnight upon a clock… a masked figure… terror, of horror, and of disgust…There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made,” (Poe 88). I think that when they saw the masked figure, at the stroke of midnight, that it was the moment in the story that the people realized it was their last hour. “The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave… mask… so