Symbolism In The Masque Of The Red Death

If someone is poisoned, don’t they die? The poison doesn’t allow anybody to know when they’ll die, just as the red death. Poe describes the red death as the poison depicting death for all those around it. During the 1800's, the red death was infecting everyone in New England. Once the red death had infected someone, it would eventually kill them; but the worst part is that they didn't know when they were going to die. Poe uses diction and imagery to explain how the clock symbolizes death. In “The Masque of the Red Death”, Edgar Allan Poe uses the symbolism of the abbey clock to establish the fact that death is inevitable.

Clocks allow you to experience the true meaning of time, which is what happened in The “Masque of the Red Death”. …show more content…
Roth shows how Poe’s symbolism of the clock portrays the ideas of fear, suspense, and power over the people. It creates fear and suspense because every time the clock chimes, someone dies and they don’t know when they’ll die until it chimes. Power is depicted from the quote because the clock has the ability to determine the fate and death of people’s lives. The diction that Roth uses indicates the way he feels about the subject, that it’s a terrible thing not to know when someone will die as the clock counts down the amount of time they have left. While the clock chimed, the book asserts, “and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly 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 harken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions;” (don’t know). The diction used interprets the way …show more content…
Throughout the story, the guests at Prospero’s seventh apartment didn’t understand what that meant and Poe stated, “The guest begin to fall one by one and the clock stops ticking to mark the final death” (don’t know). Imagery is used here to reveal how everyone in the room started to die because of the one thing they were hiding from, the red death. They didn’t find out what that meant until their untimely demise where they were all dying at once. The guests never thought they would be the ones to get the plague and die, so they didn’t think much about death. This caused them to oversee the fact that it was too late for them as soon as they were in that apartment. At the bottom of a literary criticism, Zimmerman wrote, “(the phantom suggests an hour hand, Prospero a minute hand, the abbey half a clock face)”(Zimmerman). In this quote especially, imagery is used to reveal the way Prospero is running for his life, but won’t live to see another day. Zimmerman symbolizes Prospero and the phantom (red death) as the hour and minute hand on the abbey clock. So the phantom is almost to 12 am, showing that he is waiting for Prospero to come, while Prospero is trying to run from it and goes all around the clock. Around the end of the story when everyone is having their final moments, Poe expresses the symbolism of the clock, “And the life of the ebony clock went out with the last of the gay” (don’t know). This quote demonstrates how when the

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