The Masque of the Red Death By Edgar Allen Poe
The Masque of the Red Death has many memorable events throughout the story. The begging it self was very memorable. I mean how many people walk out on their people to have a party and then let them die painfully, Prince Prospero does. It was a deadly pestilence the left its victim with open bloody sores that gave out puss, many were left marked and scared in the face yet he managed to plan a good time. For this beautiful party the prince put thousands of his friends in a guarded and bolted down castle, all away from the sick. Something very strange in the castle were the seven rooms all of which were decorated with different colors. One of the rooms gave people chills because it was all black. I mean who needs a black room? I distinctively remember this room having an ebony clock that when it struck the hour everyone stopped what they were doing, the orchestra music stopped and the dancers would stop dancing. All the rooms also had a tripod of burning fire but when this light hit the black room, it would make its windows look like as if it had blood dripping down the glass. Well in this marvelous and most magical masquerade appeared a mysterious hooded figure without a trace of where he came from. The last memorable thing was how the Prince Prospero died in front of the hooded figure. He just fell dead and then everyone there was killed one by one. “When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and domes of his co
urt, and with there retired to the deep seclusion of his castellated abbeys” was the line that represented the story for me.
The Prince Prospero was cold-hearted, uncaring, and ignorant. This was shown when it said that “It was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a mashed ball of the most unusual magnificence.” He was also very different and bizarre and “Here the case was different, as might have been expected from the duke’s love of the bizarre” represented this. Prince Prospero was very imaginative and creative “His plans were bold fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric luster.” Most of all, the Prince was nutty and it was represented in “There are some who would have thought him mad.” There was not much on how he looked. In my opinion, the Red Death was what motivated Prince Prospero. He was trying to stay away from the bleeding pore pestilence that was killing his people. He hid from the problem by having been bolted into his castle with the presence of a thousand of his friends.
The theme of The Masque of the Red Death was death. There were dieing people everywhere and suffering from the effects of the pestilence. Even in the castle, the black room represented death with its bloody glass windows. Even though they only looked like this when the light hit them, all the people there still felt the presence of death and of how it was happening out side of the walls of the castle. The ebony clocks loud ticking probably reminded that guests that their time was up and that they too would come to their end. There was no escaping the Red Death. Indeed this is what they all were trying to accomplish, especially Prince Prospero. He was trying to run away from the problem but the problem found him, but in the form of the hooded black figure. Death came, crashed the party and took the life of the prince and of all the people there.
