Setting and Story
The setting in the story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, is very important to the story as a whole. In many situations it is needed to relay important ideas. There are three main things in the plot that give the story this special touch. One example is the color of the rooms of the abbey. The next thing is the seclusion of the abbey, This gives the characters a false sense of security and a sort of dramatic irony to the reader. The third thing in the setting was the era that story took place.
The colors of the rooms play an important role in the story. Each room seems to take on a kind of theme some more obvious than others. The Black room represented the “Red Death” even though this is not stated the reader can assume this because the people avoid that room during the story. No one enters it until the “Red Death” kills the prince in it. The rooms add a lot to the story. They help convey the idea that their are two forces at work. The good and the bad, the bad being the red death, and the good being the party, full of life and excitement. They also help the reader see that the people would rather forget about the plague outside, and that helps the reader realize why the people where so opposed to the “Red Death” when he made his appearance.
The seclusion of the abbey also adds to the story. The seclusion of the abbey gives the characters a sort of false sense of security. The characters believed that they would be safe from the plague by boarding up the gates and sealing themselves inside. When they where actually locking themselves into there own deaths, and by locking and welding the gates the author brings the attention of dramatic irony to the reader.
The third thing in the plot that had a significant effect on the story was the time the story took place. The effect of this ordeal accruing during medieval times is the reader associates all the suspicions and mythological ideas of that time with the story, allowing the reader to more actually experience the emotions of the people of that time.
It was good setting to get the attention from the audience and also a way to move around or change settings of the play. Although I love this play my small critic for this play was the players. Some others actors had understandable accents but others didn’t. For example, the brother of the servant his accent was confusing because he kept switching his accent from different country languages. This play was really nice it had a little of bit of everything drama, comedy, romance, betrayal. What like about this play it was how they used the dramatic structure the inciting incident and the climax. The inciting incident for this play of musical comedy murders of 1940 was guessing who the killer of the play was because there was tension building up not knowing who the murder was. The climax for this play would be for me finding out who was the murder and just being in shock how everything had change into a new scenario. Overall it was amazing show how it developed and how well an organized transition the play
“The scarlet stains upon the body, and especially upon the face of the victim, caused terror in those watching the afflicted” (7). The story starts off with the prince getting away to a castle with his healthy friends. They were going to throw a masque party, and all was going well until the masker showed up. Everyone was scared including the knights. As the masker made its way from the blue room to the black room, nobody moved. The prince felt like it was his job to get up and take control. He entered the black room with the Masker and that’s when everyone heard a scream, the prince was dead. Eventually, all his friends dropped dead too. In “The Masque of the Red Death” the seven rooms represent the seven stages of life; infancy, childhood,
The Masque of the Red Death was very serious from the beginning to end. The story never pulled away from the sense of a looming threat. Poe did not waste anytime, he cut straight to the point and set the tone right away. The tone relates to people language and the specific words that he uses to create illusion and imagery. Poe uses different times of words to define his language which is called Old English today. Poe sentences are also short and they are practically identical in the simple structure. Poe is a very different writer than most writers today, he has a unique way about his language.
In “The Masque of the Red Death,” the location of the rooms represents the cycle of life and death, with the bright blue room all the way to the east, where the sun rises and the day begins, and the black, morbid room all the way to the west, where the sun sets and the day ends. The reader comes to understand that the most eastern room represents the beginning of life, while the most western room
The story starts off with a rainy, gloomy,candle light or fire light setting, very typical opening features of a story written in the gothic genre. H.G Wells describes a fire-lightened room and straight away ghosts and the supernatural are mentioned by the main character, this gets the reader involved straight away where it starts with speech. After this the reader meets the strange characters of the story - the old people.When the narrator meets the old people we see his arrogence towards them as he describes them in a sense that he is actually mocking them and their suspicions to do with the red room. When infact the old people...
...Plessis, Eric H. du. “Deliberate Chaos: Poe’s Use of Colors in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’.” Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism 34.1-2 (June-December 2001): p40-42. Literature Resource Center. Web. 8 April 2012.
I see very unique content throughout different parts of the story. The setting of the Masque of The Red Death, involves a wealthy prince I his extremely ostentatious palace, along in his palace are very wealthy nobles and merchants in his ballroom during a dance and cocktail event. There are some of the finest instrument musicians at the dance and cocktail event and a clock that sounds a dreadful sound almost like something you would hear before the apocalypse comes down and a meteorite hits. But that’s beside the point, when the clock rings its dreadful sound at midnight; all dancing stops and the room becomes extremely quiet. All sound stops and there is almost no noise; this is when the Red Death comes out to pounce on his unknowing victims. The tone of the story is very quiet and calm at first then becomes more uneasy when the clock first rings its dreadful sound. But all the uneasiness just gets worse to the maximum as the final ring happens at midnight, when everything and all sound drops and again the Red Death comes out to pounce. The style is almost as if it is a tragedy, which when you think about it is really a tragedy as all people die in the end like a slasher or gore type horror movie minus all the gore in this story Masque of The Red Death. The plot is well written with the story getting more and more unnerving, uneasy and downright scary for
Color symbolizes a lot in the story. In the story you see excessive use of colors. The first most clear color symbol is white which doesn't express the purity but the false purity and goodness in the people. The next is gray, valley of ashes, which expresses the lack of spirit in that area. The green shows the hope of a new start, or to work for something. Red is death , or blood. Yellow expresses the corruptness in society and dishonest behavior in society. Also yellow represents the coward image of characters.
“The Masque of the Red Death” was written by Edgar Allen Poe in the 19th century. This story was written during the Gothic era. The stories that are written in the Gothic era is usually has to do with death, and lots of people were fascinated by the stories. There are many symbols in “The Masque of the Red Death”, yet I chose three, the first is all the colors of the room, second is the ebony clock and the last is the inside and outside of the abbey.
In the "Masque of the Red Death," the first sentence, "The Red Death had long devastated the country," sets the tone for the whole story. Poe describes the horrors of the disease, stressing the redness of the blood and the scarlet stains. The disease kills so quickly that one can die within thirty minutes of being infected with the disease. To create a frightening effect of the revulsion of this disease, Poe uses words such as "devastated," "fatal," "horror of blood," and "sharp pains and profuse bleeding." In summary, the story relates the prince, trying to be safe and away from the horrible death, invites a thousand friends to be in seclusion in his abbey away from the disease. During a celebration , a masked ball at the abbey - with incredible described rooms and moods - a surprise masked intruder causes death to all.
...le contradicts the pleasant ambience of the town. When the foreshadowing job reaches its goal, it leads to the climatic point of the story. Through this climax, the reader sees the cruelty of the residents and how they undervalue life for this particular ritual.
Settings are used in short stories so that they can complement the themes. Themes in “The Cask of Amontillado” included revenge and deception, which were brought out by the carnival and the catacombs settings. Themes in “Hills Like White Elephants” included evasion of responsibility and miscommunication, and this was outlined by the train tracks, the environment on either side of the train tracks, and the hills themselves. Hence, in both short stories, setting played an integral role in emphasizing the themes.
An author’s usage of the element of setting can assist the readers in tying the story together and better appreciating of the thoughts and significant ideas mentioned in it. The setting of a story is used to convey key information of the time era, the type of society as well as the state of the characters in which the narrative takes place. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby being one of the most criticized, analyzed, quoted and interpreted piece of writing since the time it was published. The author would not have been able to drive interest in his writing without the prominent setting. He uses the setting to create powerful perceptions and transmit ideas in order to build that interest. Similarly in Garen Thomas’s biography of President Barack Obama, Yes We Can the author utilizes the setting of the late 20th Century and early 21st Century in the United States of America which contributes towards the making of the 44th President - Barack Obama. It shows the hardships and the struggle to prove his identity as an African American under various societal, familial as well as political influences. It portrays how his sheer optimism, enthusiastic determination and his utmost belief that “change can happen” (Barack Obama) intensifies the true essence of setting within this piece of literature. It glorifies the fact that freedom includes opportunity for prosperity and success, and also that upward social mobility is greatly achieved through hard work and perseverance.
The book has four metaphors, all of which have a significant part in the understanding of the novel. The first metaphor the readers encounter is the broken wine cask. The wine cask represents the plight of the poor and the blood of the revolution. The scene explicitly describes the people literally licking the streets and dripping the wine into the mouths of their children. The novel states, “Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women’s heads, which were squeezed dry into infants’ mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish.” The novel also shows the wine cask as a metaphor for the blood of the revolution. The red color of the wine is similar to that of rich, red blood, shed by many because of the plight of the poor experienced in France. The second metaphor would be revealed as the grind stone. The grind stone, which was used to grind the food the poor needed so badly, later became used to sharpen the tools the poor would use to overthrow the government. The grindstone became a metaphor of killing and empowered poor throughout the novel. The third metaphor is the shadow. A shadow represents the great unknown, the great unexpected. Not a single person may prepare for the unknown. None of the characters could prepare for the events that came about in the plot, such as the denouncement of
Among the strongest points that can be interpreted from the novel is the way the industrial revolution threated to make people no more than machines. In a certain way the ash, which was spewed from the factories contaminated everything. Anything remarkable, anything identifiable about the town was covered in the dark by product of the industrial revolution. As the anonymous narrator notes of the town, “it was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it…it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage” (Dickens 25). The colors that are used to describe the town, often associated with death, are interpreted to represent the death of the inhabitants’ humanity; a perverse mask that hides all shameful emotions of a town obsessed with facts. The fact that black ash covers the red brick, a color indicative of life, emotion, and passion, displays the remarkable ability of the new era to cover and suffocate all human sens...