Edgar Guest

Edgar Allan Poe was an author with a very distinguished sense of style that included many works of horror and torture. Some of his most famous works are: The Raven, the Masque of the Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Pit and the Pendulum. Arguably, The Masque of the Red Death is one of his more elaborate texts which is often studied in a school setting. The short story is one of intense imagery, suspense, and a critical lesson to be learned. The imagery in the Masque of the Red Death,…

In Edgar Allan Poe 's short story "The Masque of the Red Death", the plague has devastated Prince Prospero 's kingdom, leaving most of the population dead or infected. The Prince responds to this tragedy by securing himself, and one thousand of the most regal lords and ladies, in a castellated abbey; this their attempt to escape death themselves, however, they are aware that this cannot be done. The dread of this inevitable death is displayed symbolically and through the vivid language used by…

Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allan Poe, each show suspense in different ways. Suspense is simply tension between the reader and anticipation for what will happen next. In the Landlady, a seventeen year old boy, named Billy Weaver, enters a motel named, Bed and Breakfast, he wanted a nice cheap hotel. The seemingly innocent land lady, who is the only worker running the motel, seems to be holding a secret from Billy. As the night moves on, Billy becomes suspicious about the previous guests of the…

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest literary writers known to man. He is the type of writer who uses symbols in all of his stories to illustrate the main point of the plot. In The Masque of the Red Death, he uses the colors to represent the stages of life. He uses the seventh room to personify death and the clock as a time limit for the characters in the short story. When people read the story they get an idea about how Poe visualizes the way his story should go. “There were buffoons, there…

Many will speak of Edgar Allen Poe, and call him a madman, a necromaniac, and that he had to have been suffering from some sort of mental illness to write the things that he did. In actuality, Poe was an author who crafted beautiful, thought provoking stories about the simple reality of life and death. This can be proven true through several of Poe’s works, including “The Black Cat”, “The Premature Burial”, and several others. Edgar Allen Poe did have an obsession with death, but he shared this…

Death Is it possible to escape death if one truly ignores it and believes they can, or are we all doomed to an untimely demise. These statements are a main premise for the story of “The Masque of the Red Death”. “The Masque of the Red death” by Edgar Allen Poe is a thrilling, mysterious, and captivating story about an oblivious prince and a disease that is wiping his kingdom much similar to the Black Plague. Prince Prospero hears the news of a disastrous epidemic spreading and quickly shuts…

Supernatural, a manifestation or event that attributes to some force beyond scientific and logical understanding. For many, these events involve ghosts, a haunted object and/or a place, just like the events that take place in “The Judge’s House,” by Bram Stoker. The main character, Malcolm Malcolmson is a hardworking young man who just wanted a quiet place to study for an upcoming exam that would isolate him from distractions. Malcolm goes on a search for a quiet place, and then comes across the…

Throughout the stories of “The Monkey” by Stephen King and Dracula by Bram Stoker it is seen how there is an element of the uncanny at work. As each of these narratives is read, what we have become familiarized with as human beings becomes foreign and unsettling to us. What we thought we understood has been changed and has now become frightening. To better understand the uncanny I will first summarize how Sigmund Freud describes it, then I will argue that there is an element of the uncanny in…

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality” (Poe). Edgar Allan Poe harnesses the power of gothic horror literature in his disturbing“The Black Cat” and his famous “The Masque of the Red Death.” Both of these stories weave increasingly horrific tales of tragic consequences and altered states of mind. “The Black Cat” tells the tale of a frequent drunk who ends up killing both his cat and his wife in one such example of momentary insanity. “The Masque of…

The title “The Masque of the Red Death” Author - Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) Date - First published as “The Masque of the Red Death. A Fantasy” in 1842. Republished as “The Masque of the Red Death” in the July 1845 issue of a magazine called the Broadway Journal Summary - At the beginning of the story we are introduced to the red death and Prince Prospero. The prince goes to lock off himself and all his friends away in his luxurious “Castellated abbey” to stall the coming of death as…