A person cannot escape their unwanted arrival of death. In the short story, “Masque of the Red Death,” Edgar Allan Poe describes the many ways people fear death.The story is about Prince Prospero having a masquerade. During the masquerade, there were many signs of death, but everyone ignored each sign. In the end, death caught up to them all and Prince Prospero tried to avoid the deadly plague. To enhance his allegory of death in “Masque of the Red Death,” Poe expresses a person should not dwell or fear their death through his portrayal of the clock, the mummer, and the tripods.
Poe uses the clock to symbolize time passing. During the masquerade, Poe had a clock inside and every came with a more unsettled feeling. This is referenced multiple times throughout the story and the speaker
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As the revelers stopped, the tripod’s light filled the room with brightness.“But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room” (Poe 2). After the clock rang, the revelers went back to normal and did not think anything of the lights. They all nervously laughed off any suspicion they had and started the masquerade again. The day turned into night and the tripods were still illuminating life with its bright rays. As every one of the revelers started to drop dead, the tripod’s flames started to dwindle. “And the flames of the tripods expired” (Poe 6). As the clock stopped chiming and the flames disappeared from the tripods, it symbolized each and every one of the revelers’ lives ending. None of the revelers suspected the symbols but in the end they figured out that their days were coming to an end. By all deaths, darkness held everyone captive. Therefore, the use of the tripod helped pull together how death and life are