Examples Of Allegory In The Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe’s, “Masque of the Red Death” narrates the story about Prince Prospero locking away his select of healthy nobles along with himself in an effort to merely avoid The Red Death that is spreading around his kingdom. The tale embarks with a third person point of view, but slowly transitions into first person, confusing readers on who this narrator could be. In “The Coy Reaper: Unmasque-ing the Red Death”, Cassuto claims that “The teller of the tale is Death himself.” but Dudley believes otherwise in “Dead or Alive: The Booby-Trapped Narrator of Poe's ‘Masque of the Red Death.’” when arguing that even though Cassuto gives a clever consideration for the narrator’s survival, the explicit symbol of death rejects the main theme of “death's

In the story, they all eventually die, which leads to the curiosity of how the narrator lived to share the tale. Cassuto agrees to this by stating, “The Red Death is indeed extraordinary, but so must be the narrator, for he has somehow lived to tell us about it.”. The survival of the narrator is yet another clue that leads readers to the conclusion of the narrator being the Red Death. In the beginning of the story, it is described how “the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” (Poe 10). This is shown to prove that the narrator must have been a witness that somehow survived in order to narrate. Cassuto gives his insight, stating, “The only one who "lives" is Death. The narrator must be Death

He also articulates that the narrator must be a witness to events, similar to what Cassuto was expressing. However, he later claims that on the other hand, “the narrator is outside the story as a reporter of events. As a witness the narrator is contained by the story, while as a reporter he contains the story.” (Dudley 171). What he is striving to say is that he did not have to be a survivor in order to narrate, but instead could have been a bystander. Then he goes on to explain that as the witness, he’d be controlled by the story, since he saw the events take place. In contrast, as a reporter, he’d control the story, meaning he had the chance to conjure up images from his own mind since he did not experience the