[In the following excerpt, Cassuto suggests that Death himself is the narrator in Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” and explores the thematic implications of this discovery.]

Much has been written about Poe's narrators, and with good reason. Nearly always unnamed—and therefore seen as somehow unreliable—they also have disturbing tendencies that range from the unstable and the obsessed all the way to the insane.¹ In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and several other tales, Poe himself even enters into the fiction, commencing the atmosphere of confusion that pervades throughout. All of this indicates that Poe wants us to pay attention to his narrators. If that is his goal, he has succeeded handsomely, but not completely. “The Masque of the Red Death” is a notable exception.² The story has a narrator unique in the Poe canon. The teller of the tale is Death himself.

Substantiating such a claim must begin with locating a first-person narrator in the story. At first there does not appear to be one, but closer study reveals that an “I” is in fact relating the action. Perhaps no one has remarked upon his presence before because, unlike many of Poe's more overtly bizarre narrators, this one never steps up and introduces himself. For all of this seeming reticence, though, the raconteur of “The Masque of the Red Death” makes his presence known on three separate occasions.

The first of these comes after the description of the isolation of Prospero and his followers. After five or six months in the abbey that he has turned into a vault, Prospero has announced the masked ball, and all is being prepared. Here, the narrator steps forward for the first time:

It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held.³

Who is this “me”? He must be someone who has seen the inside of Prospero's self-imposed prison, but it has been sealed “to leave means of neither ingress nor egress” (251). This fact points to the narrator's presence in the group inside the walls. One could argue that Poe is simply employing a casual reference, that “me” is simply a figure of speech, but the frequency of the narrator's direct intervention (three times in a seven-page story) precludes this assumption.

The story has a narrator, then, but this narrator may not be a character in the story. Perhaps Poe has adopted a familiarly omniscient first-person narrator which would allow him to achieve a compromise between first-person involvement and third-person omniscience. This is not a new device, to be sure—Hawthorne, for one, employs it in many of his stories and romances.⁴ Maybe Poe does mean to have an “I” telling the story from without. The possibility certainly exists, but not to the exclusion of all others. Furthermore, such a narrator would be unique among Poe's tales of horror.⁵ On the few occasions when he does employ omniscient narration,⁶ it is always in the third person. All of his other first-person narrators live and breathe within their own fictional worlds; I submit that the teller of “The Masque of the Red Death” does so as well.

Given the presence of a narrator, it is clear that he can be nowhere else but present at the festivity. There would be no other way for him to describe a pause in the activity at midnight: “And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before” (255).

The narrator's comparison proves that he has been there since the beginning of the party. His reference to what he has already told hearkens back to a previous description of how the striking of the clock would stop the orchestra. The third and final time he refers to himself further confirms his presence amidst the merriment. He compares the Red Death figure to the other masqueraders at the party: “In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation” (255).

The Red Death is indeed extraordinary, but so must be the narrator, for he has somehow lived to tell us about it.

The narrator's survival thus presents a contradiction which allows for an alternate reading of the story, one that adds a new dimension to the grotesque scene which Poe describes.⁷ According to the narrator's own account, no one survives the Red Death's “illimitable dominion.” How could the narrator be present at the ball and then be able to tell about it afterwards? The only one who “lives” is Death. The narrator must be Death himself.

This discovery adds a gruesomely ironic aspect to the entire tale. Death's storytelling is marked by a smooth, deliberate, almost deadpan calm. There is a sense of inevitability to the scene which precludes tension because the narrator already knows what will happen. The outcome is as dependable as the passing time, symbolized by the striking clock which governs the action in the story.⁸ No one escapes Death, so it is natural that Death should not perceive any suspense. Nor has Death any need for self-aggrandizement. We see the final confrontation between Death and the pursuing prince from Death's perspective, but description of the moment of truth is carefully avoided: “There was a sharp cry—and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterward, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero” (257). Only Death could have seen all of this; Prospero has run through six rooms while the other party guests remain shrunk against the walls in fear. Death is describing his own actions, but without telling us exactly what happens. His tone as a narrator is consistent with his character in the story: matter-of-fact, final, and anonymous.

As Death remains masked to Prospero, so Death remains masked to us. The mockingly self-deprecatory way that he hides himself in both the action and the narration furnishes a humorous tinge to the macabre that is already present in the story, giving a uniquely grotesque turn to an already grotesque creation. Harpham has elsewhere pointed out various puns in the story's structure (e.g., the guests are “dis-concerted” when the clock stops)⁹ Another can now be added to the list: Death is the author of Prospero's fate in more ways than one.

Notes

1. Daniel Hoffman suggests that these nameless, unconnected narrators allow Poe to depict psychological struggle in disguise, without having to focus on family ties (Daniel Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe [New York: Doubleday Press, 1972], p. 226).

2. Of all the critics who have given attention to this story over the years, only one has commented upon the narrative presence in it. Geoffrey Galt Harpham sees the narrator as “an undercover agent working for the plague” whose function is to draw the reader into a “read death” (Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque [New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1982], p. 117). Though interesting, this reading treats the narrator as a strategy, not as a character.

3. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. 4, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 251. All subsequent references to this story will be made parenthetically within the text.

4. For example, The House of the Seven Gables. Hawthorne also uses first-person narrative frames for some of his tales.

5. And almost alone among all of the others as well. “King Pest,” which has an unidentified “I” who surfaces twice, cannot properly be said to be a story of horror, grotesque as it may be. The narrator, who refers to the protagonists as “our heroes,” keeps things light. “Metzengerstein” is briefly introduced by a narrator who is typically Poe-ish in his deliberate withholding of information, but who makes no appearance thereafter.

   Among Poe's humorous efforts, “Bon-Bon” and “The Devil in the Belfry” have omniscient narrators who carry on from the outset, putting themselves into almost every sentence, so that they not only insert themselves into their tales, but arguably become the dominant characters in them. The result is a parody of narrative reliability.

6. Outside of the mock articles, the angelic colloquies, and other dialogues such as “Some Words with a Mummy,” “A Tale of Jerusalem” is a rare example.

7. Among his few direct references to the term, “The Masque of the Red Death” contains Poe's most explicit description of his own vision of the grotesque. Wolfgang Kayser has called his portrayal of the revelers “perhaps the most complete and authoritative definition any author has given of the grotesque” (Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. U. Weisstein [Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963], p. 79).

8. For a more detailed treatment of this idea, see Edward Pitcher, “Chronological and Horological Time in ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’” American Transcendental Quarterly 29 (1976), 71-75.

9. Harpham, p. 114.