A Sound Of Thunder And The Masque Of The

Imagery in Storytelling

Imagery is a literary device that is a key component of short stories. It improves a reader's experience of the story by appealing to their senses and allowing them to visualize the world where the story takes place. Imagery can also make the reader curious about the purpose of certain descriptions, and help the reader understand the world and people being described. “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury and “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe are two short stories that make use of imagery to do these things. “A Sound of Thunder” takes place in the year 2055, when a company called Time Safari, Inc. allows adventurers to travel back in time to hunt extinct animals, like dinosaurs. A confident hunter named

“The Masque of the Red Death” takes place in a country where a disease called the Red Death is spreading and causing many people to die gruesome deaths. Despite this, the prince, Prospero, ignores the plague and invites his noble friends to take refuge behind the gates of his castle. He then throws a fancy masquerade ball to entertain his guests. These are both different stories that use imagery to improve the reader's experience and immerse them in the story. "A Sound of Thunder" uses imagery to describe the setting and the characters, which makes the story more entertaining. While waiting for their Tyrannosaurus Rex, the jungle that the hunters were in was large and brimming with life. But everything suddenly froze once the dinosaur entered the story. Bradbury describes the dinosaur with great detail. "Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh"(Bradbury 6). This quote uses metaphors and similes to compare the dinosaur to objects, which can

Throughout the story, Poe uses a lot of imagery to describe the peculiar design of Prince Prosperos’ party. He describes the rooms at the party as bizarre, but fun and extravagant. But the last room he describes is very different compared to the other rooms. “But in the western or black chamber the effect of the firelight that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered...”(Poe 5). The description of this room gives the reader a sense of eeriness by using descriptors like "blood-tinted", and 'ghastly', which are associated with all things sinister and mysterious. Compared to the other rooms at the party, this room is the only one described in this way, which makes the reader intrigued and want to read further. Later, when the Red Death is introduced, the party-goers are disgusted and confused by its sudden emergence. “The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. … His vesture was dabbled in blood, and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror” (Poe 8). Poe paints a vivid picture of the Red Death by his clothing. He compares his mask to a “stiffened corpse” being “besprinkled with the scarlet