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Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death

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In a story written by Edgar Allan Poe called “The Masque of the Red Death” we find that we can’t escape from all of our problems. The main characters name is Prince Prospero and he lives in a town that is being taken over by a disease called the Red Death. He doesn’t want to die from this disease and he doesn’t want his friends to die either, so he invites all of his friends into his castle and boards up all windows and doors so that no one could have access to the outside world. Little to their knowing this just insured their death. This story also uses many different examples of symbolism like how the masquerade ball represents how they are all hiding from the Red Death, how the clock at the end of all the rooms represents death, and how the the Red Death appeared in a person’s body but wasn’t really a person. One example of symbolism in “The Masque of the Red Death” is how the masquerade ball represents how all these people are hiding from the Red Death. This is symbolism because a masquerade ball is a party where everyone wears mask. The show that they wanted to hide from the Red Death because they didn’t want to die. The masks represent the castle in a way because they locked themselves in a castle to hide from the Red Death as well. Both the mask and the castle were …show more content…
The clock symbolized death because it was like their countdown until they died. The clock only started to strike after about six months of the prince and his friends being in the castle. The sound of the clock was describe to be, “Clear and loud and deep and musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound.” When the clock did strike, it meant that all these people were about to lose their lives. After the clock striked a unknown person showed up that no one had see

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