What Are The Rhetorical Devices Used In The Masque Of The Red Death

All writings, whether fictional or nonfictional, have a purpose. Whether it’s an argument or a theme, the author is trying to convey something. The use of rhetorical devices can help express the author’s point. Then “The Masque of the Red Death,” a gothic short story by Edgar Allan Poe, symbolism and allusion are used to express the theme that death is inevitable. Unlike most, “The Masque of the Red Death” is jampacked with symbolism, the two most prominent being that of the seven rooms and the large ebony clock. In Prince Prospero’s abbey, there are seven separate rooms, each a different color, all laid out east to west. During his masquerade ball, from east to west, the blue room, purple room, green room, orange room, white room, and violet

Though Poe took the short story in an entirely different sort of direction, some speculate that he got the idea from William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” Not only did he name the prince “Prospero” like the main character in “The Tempest,” but he also devised the plague from it. In “The Tempest,” the antagonist, Caliban, screams out, demanding the “red plague” kill Prospero. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe refers to it differently, initially saying that the part was “without the ’Red Death,’” (Poe 15). But, like Caliban wanted in “The Tempest,” in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the “Red Death,” finally caught up to Prince Prospero. Using the comparison to Shakespeare, the story is filled with a tragedy that almost all of Shakespeare’s dramas were filled with. This tragedy evokes an empathetic feeling for the foolishness of the prince, so lost in his power that he put himself above death, like a god, like Shakespeare’s Prospero. His allusion to the Bible is used similarly. Not only did he allude to King Herod when saying “he […] had out-Heroded Herod,” (Poe 16), but also when he says that the Red Death “came like a thief in the night,” (Poe 17). In First Thessalonians chapter five verse two, he mentions that Jesus was going to come “like a thief in the night” and even though people would think they were safe and protected, they would