It announces to the reader that time is winding down, that the arrival of Death is imminent and that soon the story, the party, and the lives of all the characters will be over. How that will happen is what the story hides. The surprise is that one of the guests whom the revelers think has inappropriately dressed like a plague victim is not actually in costume but is actually the Plague personified.
The abbey represents a kind of gated community. It is a symbol of the attempt of some to separate themselves from the everyday toils and struggles of the common herd. It symbolizes the effort of the wealthy elites to separate themselves from unpleasantries and while away the time having parties. The masque ball represents the way in which people disguise themselves yet hide the reality underneath: they project something humorous or gawdy or appalling but really they are all human. The combined symbol of the abbey and the ball is that the rich prince thinks he is above everything that affects ordinary people. The big reveal of the story of course is that he is not above anything. Death is the great equalizer and death comes for all “like a thief in the night.” Death comes unexpectedly and no one in the story nor even the reader himself expects it, even though all the signs and symbols are there to show that it is coming.
The symbols are used to develop the theme of the story which is that Death is not something that can be escaped from. All of life leads up to it. The clock will strike the last time. The stages of life have a beginning, a middle and an end. This awareness is intuitive to man. The nature of the rooms says it is so. The prince has designed the rooms to reflect this reality even if it is unrealized. The symbols are used to develop the story by layering it with a deeper meaning and building up the underlying sense of dread that is lurking among the party-goers.
(Poe) This is important because the black room, being the final room, represented death, and the death that was threatening everyone was the plague known as the "Red Death." This room also had a great ebony colored clock that struck out on the hour in a loud and most annoying manner. The clock is also symbolic of time, and how time is always ticking away on a person's life,
Pluto is the Roman god of the underworld, and Poe is foreshadowing a hellish and horrific experience for the narrator. He also sets up an expectation in the reader and truly tests the thin but palpable sympathetic emotional response that is built in the opening lines of the story. He foreshadows the narrator's actions by stating subtly that the narrator has begun to feel strangely as the story unfolds.
In this story, we find this terror, especially at the end of the story when Fortunato sobers up. Montresor tells us that the cry he hears as he places the final bricks in the wall is "not the cry of a drunk man" (Poe 94). The drunk man and the crazy man are pitted against once another in this tale and there is nothing Fortunato can do when he
Man of the Crowd By Edgar Allan Poe (1840) The story significantly depicts not only the preoccupation of the 17th hundred London issues and a trend brought by the progressive industrialization of time, but speaks so much relevance in our modern time as well. The epigraph which sums up the very essence of the story explains the dynamic of a human being too busy to mingle with the crowd for fear of