Examples Of Allegory In The Masque Of The Red Death

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In the short story, The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allen Poe tells a dark tale of a prince and his masquerade of death. In the story the prince, Prince Prospero, holds a luxurious ball at his enclosed castle ending in the demise of him and the attendees. Though the prince is a powerful and wealthy noble that seems to be fortified from any danger, he cannot escape the inevitability of his death. Throughout The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe uses literary techniques such as symbolism, allegory, and alliteration to develop a theme of power, that death is more powerful than any human can be. Poe demonstrates a very obvious use of symbolism to illustrate the theme of death’s power over the characters in the story. One of the many …show more content…

A more specific category of symbolism, and one of the many things Poe is known for, an allegory is used to symbolize a deeper moral of the story, which in this story is the power and inevitability of death. What gives away that this short story is an allegory is the first paragraph that Poe writes about the “Red Death”. This fictitious disease represents something more realistic and important to Poe. It represents tuberculosis and how it took the life of several women in his life. With this story about this “Red Death”, writing it as allegory helps him express how death has had a powerful influence over his life. Another symbol he uses for allegory is the masked visitor as he represents just how powerful death really is. Poe personifies death by making death into one of the characters of the story. The masked figure, an unwanted being that somehow got past of the “security” of the prince’s palace, after being uncloaked by the attendants of the masquerade, was “untenanted by any tangible form… and now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death” (Poe). This use of allegory gives us that deeper moral that death can be anywhere, in this case in the form of a human, which adds to its powerful

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  • Compare And Contrast The Masque Of The Red Death And The Raven

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    In the short story “ The Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allen Poe uses symbolism to express ideas to develop his theme and characters. “ The Masque of the Red Death” tells a story of prince Prospero who locks his friends and himself in a castle to escape the Red Death, a deadly disease. Much to Prospero’s dismay, in the end, the deadly disease causes them to perish. Poe uses the dark room to reveal Prospero’s unusual character and reveal that death is always there and cannot be avoided.

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  • Setting and Organization in Poe's The Masque (Mask) of the Red Death

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