The Narrator and The Red Mask: A Dual Character?
their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation" (p. 294).
This passage suggests that the guests were awaiting the imminence of Death; they knew they could not be so lucky and escape the Red Death. It is in the twilight hour of midnight when magic is the most powerful that Death comes. He came wearing the mask of the Red Death: "the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood --and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror" (P. 595).
Death has always been quite enigmatic and trick-playing. He is the narrator telling us that there is no way to escape death. It is established that the entity that was wearing the mask was not a human when the people rebelled and tried to attack the uninvited guest. They "gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form"(p.296). He was not tangible, he was a spirit, and he was death. No one survived the Red Death. This means that it was Death who tells the story. It was him because he was the one that did not have to survive; he was the one that brought the plague about. And so, we have Death performing one of his favorite roles, the storyteller.
Bibliography
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Barnes and Noble. 1999. 292-296
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