Time Equates to Death
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death”, shows the reader of the “ticking of the clock” taking careful caution to only visually show the “ebony clock” to symbolize time, but indirectly giving connections between the guests of Prince Prospero and Death itself.
The critic Cheney gives us a clear illustration of the meaningfulness of the correlation of the time and death. Such “[that] by building time into his abbey, [Prospero] ensures his [and fellow friends] destruction.” (Cheney 246) “…while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation.” By isolating and concealing themselves in the Abbey walls, he not only greatened his chances at death, but his guests as well. While embedding the “gigantic ebony clock” into the storyline only strengthens the limited amount of time they actually have before death itself takes hold completely.
Reece similarly uses the concept “[of] the clock in the seventh room [serving] as the most overt symbol of the passing of time and the inevitability of death [in the presence all at once]. The significance of its ominous persistence is not made fully apparent to the reader or the characters until the tolling of midnight.” (Reece 189) “And [so] the revel went whirling on, until at length there commenced the sounding of the midnight upon the clock. And the music ceased… all things before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps that more of thought crept, with more… who reveled.” The poor fellow guests and Prince Prospero have had no such time to consciously figure out the “ticking” of the “gigantic ebony clock” until it striked midnight leading up to unforeseen events.
All the guests could do in the time of all the ticking’s is going into a sense of “meditation”.
Caldwell sees the “[the]...