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Essay / Analysis of The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allen Poe
The list of characters is short, but also relative to the vision adopted on the story. To begin with, Prince Prospero and the Red Death are the defining characters of this tale, but time is also a major element of the plot. Time is embodied in the clock located in the last room and is even personified throughout the story “there came from the bronze lungs of the clock a clear, loud, deep and extremely musical sound” (Poe 345). The clock reminds the partygoers of the rational reality that awaits them all in the end; and in this sense, it is a representation of the ego ruling in the identity of the partygoers and Prince Prospero. Yet, always with the constant reminder of looming morality; the It continues their lively party. The last person to stop rejoicing is Prince Prospero, who only stops for the Red Death. Prospero uses the opulence of the masquerade to feed his Freudian desires as that and to displace his thanatophobia or fear of death. In this sense, could the masquerade be the dream of a prince keen to protect his kingdom and himself from a threatening scourge? The dream descriptions of the gathering and the narrator being slightly ambiguous, intensifies this concept of false reality created by Poe. The constructed dream only stops when the Red Death makes himself known to the It, denying the inevitability of time. Death