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The Masque Of The Red Death Symbolism Analysis

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The ins and outs of life seem to be apparent to everyone; yet we all make the same mistake of ignoring what all of our lives have in common, death. Using symbolism, Edgar Allan Poe writes ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ around the theme that life is a masquerade till death.
The reader gets the first sign of this symbolism when Poe introduces the different apartments. Each apartment is decorated with a specified color and “..windows ..of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations..” (Poe 1) Poe uses the colors of these apartments to symbolize the different stages in life. The first apartment being vivid blue; corresponding with the birth or start of life. As the reader continues through the apartments, they’re hit with the purple, fearless, young child and transitioned to the green, knowledge filled mind of the young adult. Slowly, orange comes into play. Orange giving the …show more content…

The extravagant party will rage on for time on end, yet when this one action occurs, the room freezes. Poe uses this clock and the reaction of the guest to serve as birthdays. Poe shows through the clock that people will go through life always moving from one point to another, only stopping on a certain marker of birthdays or clock chimes. Poe uses the guest’s “same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation”(Poe, 2) as a symbol of people’s reaction to birthdays; a specific marker in life to show we are moving from one apartment to the next. This helps him highlight his theme by showing how the masquerade of life will continue, marked by our chimes, until we hear the last one.
Edgar Allan Poe fills ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ with symbolism to bring his theme to life. By using the color of the rooms and the marker of movement from one to the other, the reader gets a clean picture of the meaning behind the

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