Compare And Contrast Shaving And The Masque Of The Red Death

Death is inevitable. However, the ways in which people handle the presence of death are varied. In Leslie Norris’s story, “Shaving,” seventeen-year-old Barry Stanford shaves his dying father and comes to terms with his father’s approaching death. This story focuses on accepting death in a peaceful way. In contrast, Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” is more about avoiding death despite its inescapability. Prince Prospero secludes himself and his friends from a deadly plague that still finds its way into his castle. While both “Shaving” and “The Masque of the Red Death” are about death, their individual perspectives on death differ greatly. “Shaving” and “The Masque of the Red Death” are similar in the way they

In “The Masque of the Red Death,” a person who has the Red Death is “shut… out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men” (Poe 83). People fear the Red Death so much that they refuse to help anyone suffering from it out of fear of contracting it themselves. When the Red Death kills all the guests at the party, Poe writes, “darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all” (Poe 88). Here, Poe describes the Red Death as a fearsome entity capable of killing all who contract it, regardless of age or status. In contrast to the fear of death in “The Masque of the Red Death,” in “Shaving” Barry and his father learn to accept the father’s approaching death. While he is shaving his father, Barry tells him, “you don’t have to worry… Not at all. Not about anything” (Norris 4). Barry is telling his father that he will be fine when his father dies and that he should not worry about him. In the act of shaving, Barry is able to convey that he has become mature enough to handle the grief and responsibility that will come with his father’s death. Barry’s father also accepts his own death as Norris writes, “he had let go of all his authority, handed it over. He lay back on his pillow, knowing his weakness and mortality, and looked at his son with wonder, with a curious humble pride” (Norris 5). His giving up his authority to Barry shows

At the prince’s party, the masked figure appears and disrupts the festivities. Poe describes, “The mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood - and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror” (Poe 87). The figure is a representation of the Red Death as a living entity that can be among the party goers as death is among the people. On the other hand, in “Shaving,” death is not a tangible object. Norris describes, “The smell of illness was everywhere, overpowering even the perfumed lather” (Norris 5). The death that Barry’s father is facing is simply an illness with no physical form. Norris shows how death is in reality rather than a figurative representation of it. The portrayal of death as a physical entity gives it life and therefore terror to those who see it, while death as an illness is something that a human mind can come to terms with and find