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The Masque of the Red Death
In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Masque of the Red Death," Prince Prospero has gathered his friends and sequestered them within an abbey in order to protect them from the epidemic of the "Red...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The Red Death is a terrible, deadly disease that has devastated the country ruled by Prince Prospero. In fact, the narrator tells us, no disease has ever been as deadly or awful as this one. It is...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero shows his pride by believing that he could, with all his money and vast resources, actually escape death. He retires, with a thousand of his most hearty friends "to the deep...
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Literature
Absolutely, the imagery enhances the meaning of the story and, therefore, a reader's understanding of it. The imagery concerning the seven rooms of the abbey where Prince Prospero and his friends...
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The Masque of the Red Death
This is an excellent question and substantially more difficult to answer than it seems! The narrator does use the first-person pronoun "I" twice in the story, indicating that it is written from a...
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The Masque of the Red Death
This story is Romantic in that it focuses, to a great degree, on human imagination and emotion. The descriptions of the masquerade's location, the seven rooms running from east to west, each...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Several details of the seventh, westernmost, room make it seem grotesque. First, the walls and ceiling are hung with black velvet, a color and a cloth that seem to suck up and absorb all light;...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The Prince is attempting to keep himself and his guests in denial. His kingdom is dying off from the Red Death. He wants to make sure no one can get in and infect his castle, and he also wants to...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The welded locks symbolize Prospero and his guests' fear of the outside. Prospero and his guests try to seal themselves in the abbey and keep the outside world out. Instead of trying to help people...
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The Masque of the Red Death
We can find an answer to this question in Paragraphs 1 and 2 of the story. Prince Prospero and his followers retreat to the palace in order to hide from the "red death," the highly contagious and...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Both the narratives of "Ligeia" and "The Masque of the Red Death" dramatize the human desire to conquer death through the power of the will. In "Ligeia," death is conquered by means of the...
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The Tell-Tale Heart
The central idea shared by these two stories is that it is impossible to escape death. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator develops an aversion to the old man's "vulture eye," a metaphor. The...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Carl Jung was the psychoanalyst who first discussed the concept of the “shadow self.” The shadow self represents the dark sides of our personalities, where we keep all the thoughts, impulses,...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Half of the people in the Prince's "dominion" have been killed by the plague. But he is "happy and dauntless." Poe, the narrator, never mentions the Prince's attempts to fight the plague or help...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero sequesters himself and his guests in his abbey for protection from the Red Death. Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" is often read as an allegorical tale of man's fearful attempt to...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero is selfish and cares more about the wealthy members of his kingdom than the general public. The fact that Prospero builds himself a castle and holes himself up inside of it with...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The long list of precautions taken by the prince and his thousand healthy and carefree friends, immediately following the description of how deadly and awful the Red Death is, seems to foreshadow...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Time is an important theme in this story. The seven rooms symbolize the seven stages of life. Therefore, this one evening is construed in terms of a life span. As the guests move from room to room,...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero invited a thousand of the wealthiest people in his kingdom to his abbey. Prospero has a problem. His people are dying. There is a horrible disease known as the Red Death that is...
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The Masque of the Red Death
First, when Prince Prospero summons these healthy and carefree friends to his presence, they go with him to one of his most geographically isolated abbeys in order to escape from the disease and...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The Prince invites death into his home simply by virtue of his being mortal. Further, his proud belief that he can somehow render himself invulnerable to death is even greater reason for death to...
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The Masque of the Red Death
As for figurative language, Poe makes an allusion to the Victor Hugo play, Hernani, first performed in 1830, in order to enrich his own imagery by relying on the splendor associated with another...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Ultimately, Poe suggests that humans -- no matter their identity or circumstances -- do not have the power to escape death. As mortals, we are unable to avoid death, our natural human fate,...
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The Masque of the Red Death
In his short story The Masque of the Red Death, Edgar Allan Poe devotes considerable time to physical descriptions of Prince Prospero’s abbey, specifically, the adornments of the seven rooms that...
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The Masque of the Red Death
During Prince Prospero's feverish masquerade, the knights and dames dance wildly in gay company until the huge black clock tolls the hour. Thus, each hour, the dancing stops and the musicians...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero represents humankind's pride, our arrogant and mistaken belief that we can somehow escape nature and cheat death. The narrator says that "No pestilence had ever been so fatal...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero decides to respond to the frightening epidemic of the Red Death sweeping through the kingdom by holding a lavish masquerade ball and inviting the wealthiest inhabitants of the...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero’s name is ironic because he dies at the end. It is not hard to determine the significance of Prince Prospero’s name. “Prospero” sounds like “prosper.” Prince Prospero...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero decided to take a thousand of his closest friends and hole up in a castle to have a party. The Red Death was a terrible disease. It killed a person quickly and efficiently. The...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prince Prospero's decision to hold a ball while the citizens of his country fall victim to the most fatal disease they have ever encountered shows just how little he cares about them and the world...
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The Masque of the Red Death
If you are wealthy enough to be in the prince’s inner circle, you are more likely to survive the Red Death for a little while longer. The Red Death kills indiscriminately. It does not care...
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The Masque of the Red Death
One of Poe's most well-known short stories, "The Masque of the Red Death" is an atmospheric tale that owes much of its dramatic impact to the lavish descriptions of the setting in Prince Prospero's...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The first paragraph of the story describes the disease which has been sweeping through the country ruled by Prince Prospero, a disease called "the Red Death" because "Blood was its Avatar and its...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The braziers are in front of the window in each of Prospero's seven special rooms, add an eerie effect to each of the rooms. The décor in Prince Prospero’s secluded abbey is designed for effect....
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The Masque of the Red Death
If I'm Prince Prospero, as this character is described in Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Masque of the Red Death, I'm frightened of the plague sweeping the countryside, killing thousands of...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The inhabitants of the city all die of the Red Death plague. When the Red Death falls upon Prince Prospero’s city, many people die. The Red Death is dangerous and deadly. It wipes through the...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Poe primarily believed in the inevitability in life the law of of cause and effect - that nothing done could ever be escaped. Poe delved most deeply into the human psyche, but he also was a sharp...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The dissolution means that the blood is breaking down. The word “dissolution” means that something is dissolving. The word is used to describe the dissolving of the victims' blood when the Red...
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The Masque of the Red Death
If you are asking for two words that effectively describe Prince Prospero, the monarch who is the protagonist of this story, then it might be hard to narrow it down to only two. But if I were to...
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The Masque of the Red Death
Prospero chose courtiers instead of ordinary citizens to go into seclusion with him because he was selfish and arrogant. When the Red Death attacked his kingdom, Prospero did not do anything. He...
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The Masque of the Red Death
A clue to the answer to this question can be found at the very start of this short story. The "Red Death", a hideous pestilence that causes bleeding, red stains, pain, and "dissolution" in its...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The chimes from the clock send a wave of unease over the guests at the party. When the clock chimes, the musicians stop playing, leaving the chimes to be the only sound throughout the rooms. Poe...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The atmosphere inside the castle seems to be one of frantic, enforced gaiety. It is a bit reminiscent of the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles just before the outbreak of the...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The reason the masked figure causes such a stir among the other people of the party is because his costume is so much more grotesque than those of the other people. Poe says that the masked figure...
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The Masque of the Red Death
When the prince and his courtiers sealed themselves in the abbey, they were trying their best to avoid the terrible disease that was ravaging their land, so they were obviously willing to go to...
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The Masque of the Red Death
The rooms in Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" symbolize the progress of life from birth to death. The first evidence of this lies in the alignment of the rooms themselves. Poe explicitly states...
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The Masque of the Red Death
In short, it doesn't. This is actually one of the central messages of the story: that neither wealth nor status can protect a person from every human being's natural and necessary end—death....
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The Masque of the Red Death
In the story "The Masque of Red Death", the masqueraders are the people who were closest to Prince Prospero. They were the people who followed him and did as he wished, courtiers. That is precisely...
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The Masque of the Red Death
In the story, a huge black clock stands against the westernmost wall of the last room in Prince Prospero's hall. The last room is shrouded in black velvet tapestries, and its window panes are...
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The Masque of the Red Death
At the risk of complicating the assignment -- which colors in Prospero's suite of rooms are "cheery" -- there is less consensus regarding the effects of individual colors on mood than might be...
