Symbols In The Masque Of The Red Death

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Death is a concept which has taunted life for eternity. It is the one idea that all humans collectively want to solve. There are many causes to death. Some examples are disease, murder, or a natural death. When a solution to one cause of death is found, another issue always arises. It is an unavoidable problem which continues to scare people in everyday life. The possibility of death places caution on every action a person attempts. Unfortunately, death is inevitable even with the most extreme measures and ideas to escape it. Edgar Allan Poe uses colored rooms as symbols, time as a symbol, and allusions in the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” to prove that escaping death is impossible.
The symbols of the blue and purple rooms illustrate the idea of early childhood immortality. The color of each room relates to a period of the life cycle. The rooms furthest east are early life stages and the further west the room is the closer it relates to death. Poe creates the “blue [room] to represent the metaphysical concept of prebirth immortality and… [the] purple to particularize the chromatic parable vis-à-vis the tyrannical protagonist” (Zimmerman 69). Immortality is a trait that is believed to allow a human to never die. Before birth, a person has no sense of the real world, and is unable to understand the concept of death. Therefore, blue and purple demonstrate a state of being immortal without the concept of death. Prince Prospero demonstrates the symbols impact while being in the proximity of the eastern rooms. He acts as if death is not a concept which impacts his life. This idea allows him to attempt to “[s]eize [the intruder] and unmask him… [he is] in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he utter[s] these words” (Poe 3). The blue room, which is adjacent to the purple room, represents an area of safety. Blue and purple display the innocence in a person and the hope of living forever. Early life influences humans in way which gives the effect of indestructibility – the ability to do anything. The blue and purple rooms are used as a symbol to represent the escape, or even the inexistence, of death. In addition to the blue and purple rooms, the green, orange, and white rooms represent the insane idea of living forever. These rooms display the middle ages of life. A period in which a person understands the concept of death, but doesn’t want to accept it. He/she becomes mad with the impression that he/she can escape it. Prince Prospero uses the “suite[s], with its windings, its stained-glass windows, closed outer corridors, artificial illumination, and bizarre embellishments… [as an] imaginative reordering of actuality” (Vanderbilt 382). Each colored room is made with the foolish thought of escaping death. By using the rooms colors as stages of life, Prospero is attempting to escape death
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In the short story, Poe uses the narrator to describe the events as they happen. The narrator acts as a thing that is at the events, but the events themselves do not impact it. When the Red Death appears in the abbey “[it is] like a thief in the night. And one by one drop[s] the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of the revel” (Poe 4). Everyone in the castle dies to the Red Death, but the narrator lives to tell the tale. Only something that is immortal and not impacted by time can obtain this characteristic. The narrator therefore is used to represent time itself, because only time has the trait to survive forever. All people are born with the trait that eventually they will die. Humans can do everything in their power to survive, but eventually death will find them. The revellers are unable to “successfully imitate the narrator’s trick, for unlike him [they] are flesh and blood: time and death will not pause to see whether [they] remember their inevitability” (Dudley 173). When the revellers die, time does not stop. The narrator continues to narrate as the time passes to represent the idea that it is time and time is not impacted by death. Humans on the other hand are affected by death because it is an unavoidable fate. The narrator is as a symbol of time to demonstrate that humans cannot escape

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