ExpositoryEssay

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This short story of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” is one that applies allegorical symbol with deep meaning. In this story, Poe seems to be obsessed by death, and that is the fear of dying. Poe writes this story to symbolize the universal fear held by humans on death and exposes them on the numerous ways that people try to avoid it. Poe’s horror comes with the fact of being skeptical about traditional religious beliefs, a problem that lured most people’s mind in the Western World with the advent of science and reason.
Poe uses a symbol of a masked figure to represent a disease which crashes on Prince Prospero’s party called the red death which destroys the Prince Prospero’s entire kingdom. The narrator refers to it as the red death due to the redness and the horror of blood, and its victims would bleed from all body openings before dying. The masked figure is a significant representation than just a disease, but a symbol signifying death (Cutts, David & Edgar). His masks look like a “walking corpse,” and Prince Prospero is the first one to see it.
The story also tries to show revenge done to the rulers for forsaking his people. Instead of Prince Prospero leading his people in times of crises, they flee for safety to one of Prince’s abbeys structure that is strongly reinforced by welding and bolts of the gates. He had stocked the abbey with plenty of drinks and food ready to party w…