Death is a concept which has taunted life for eternity. It is the one idea that all humans collectively want to solve. There are many causes to death. Some examples are disease, murder, or a natural death. When a solution to one cause of death is found, another issue always arises. It is an unavoidable problem which continues to scare people in everyday life. The possibility of death places caution on every action a person attempts. Unfortunately, death is inevitable even with the most extreme measures and ideas to escape it. Edgar Allan Poe uses colored rooms as symbols, time as a symbol, and allusions in the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” to prove that escaping death is impossible.
The symbols of the blue and purple rooms illustrate …show more content…
In the short story, Poe uses the narrator to describe the events as they happen. The narrator acts as a thing that is at the events, but the events themselves do not impact it. When the Red Death appears in the abbey “[it is] like a thief in the night. And one by one drop[s] the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of the revel” (Poe 4). Everyone in the castle dies to the Red Death, but the narrator lives to tell the tale. Only something that is immortal and not impacted by time can obtain this characteristic. The narrator therefore is used to represent time itself, because only time has the trait to survive forever. All people are born with the trait that eventually they will die. Humans can do everything in their power to survive, but eventually death will find them. The revellers are unable to “successfully imitate the narrator’s trick, for unlike him [they] are flesh and blood: time and death will not pause to see whether [they] remember their inevitability” (Dudley 173). When the revellers die, time does not stop. The narrator continues to narrate as the time passes to represent the idea that it is time and time is not impacted by death. Humans on the other hand are affected by death because it is an unavoidable fate. The narrator is as a symbol of time to demonstrate that humans cannot escape
The symbols of the blue and purple rooms illustrate …show more content…
In the short story, Poe uses the narrator to describe the events as they happen. The narrator acts as a thing that is at the events, but the events themselves do not impact it. When the Red Death appears in the abbey “[it is] like a thief in the night. And one by one drop[s] the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of the revel” (Poe 4). Everyone in the castle dies to the Red Death, but the narrator lives to tell the tale. Only something that is immortal and not impacted by time can obtain this characteristic. The narrator therefore is used to represent time itself, because only time has the trait to survive forever. All people are born with the trait that eventually they will die. Humans can do everything in their power to survive, but eventually death will find them. The revellers are unable to “successfully imitate the narrator’s trick, for unlike him [they] are flesh and blood: time and death will not pause to see whether [they] remember their inevitability” (Dudley 173). When the revellers die, time does not stop. The narrator continues to narrate as the time passes to represent the idea that it is time and time is not impacted by death. Humans on the other hand are affected by death because it is an unavoidable fate. The narrator is as a symbol of time to demonstrate that humans cannot escape