Dead or alive: the booby-trapped narrator of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death."

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1993 by David R. Dudley

While the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" never appears in a scene, he is always on the scene. He reveals himself overtly only three times, and even then only as one who tells:

"But first let me tell of the rooms in which [the masquerade] was

held." (485)

"And the music ceased, as I have told . . ." (488)

"In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted. . ." (489) Yet as understated as this narrator is, he presents a cryptic puzzle. The problem is that while he has witnessed the fatal events inside Prince Prospero's sealed abbey and survives to tell the tale, we learn at the end that everyone within the abbey dies. The narrator's survival is therefore paradoxical. I shall get to the significance of the paradox presently, but first I would like to show why efforts to dismiss the paradox are unsatisfactory.

One possible reading of the narrator in "Red Death" is that Poe has simply been careless--that his inclusion of three first-person pronouns is casual and meaningless. (We might call this the default reading, implicit in most of the criticism on this story that is concerned with other issues entirely.) This easiest of all solutions to our point-of-view puzzle is also the least satisfying, when one considers Poe's usual extreme sensitivity to the position of his narrators. In fact, many of Poe's tales are arguably about their own existence after the death of their narrators.

For instance, "MS. Found in a Bottle" and "Shadow--A Parable" both purport to be written by narrators who are on the brink of death, and who will be dead by the time we read their texts. At first they seem to offer a promising model for a reading of "Red Death." Could not "Red Death" be written--albeit in blood--by one of Prospero's dying guests? The last sentence ("And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all" [490]) could then be read as the equivalent of Hamlet's "I am dead. . . . O, I die, Horatio! . . . The rest is silence" (5.2.338-63). No one finds Hamlet's failure to use the future tense confusing, so why quibble over the past tense in the last sentence of "Red Death"?

But Poe has precluded this solution. The puzzle of the narrator is ensured by a seemingly offhand comment exactly halfway through the story. In the middle of a description of the costumes Prospero has designed for his masque ball, the narrator tells us that "[t]here were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm--much of what has since been seen in |Hernani'" (487, emphasis added).

Once we notice this phrase, its effect is startling. The verb tense establishes once and for all the narrator's survival beyond the end of the story. Furthermore, the reference to Victor Hugo's Hernani gives the narrator a surprising contemporaneity with Poe and his initial readership. Hernani was first performed in 1830, and Poe wrote "Red Death" in 1842. By contrast, the setting of "Red Death" seems older by at least a century or two, giving the narrator an odd, duplicitous, then-and-now quality. The narrator is simultaneously in Prospero's time, Poe's time, and the reader's time (the latter two were nearly the same thing in the 1840s but have been diverging ever since). Time, as the ominous clock in Prospero's seventh chamber reminds us, is the bringer of death; but the narrator is anachronistic, in that he is not subject to time.

Therefore, whatever this narrator is, he is not a normal human being. Leonard Cassuto makes this point in an article entitled "The Coy Reaper: Unmasque-ing the Red Death," although he does not mention the Hernani phrase. Cassuto argues that the narrator is "unique in the Poe canon. The teller of the tale is Death himself" (318). Yet while this reading ingeniously accounts for the narrator's endurance, its concrete personification of death dismisses one of the central themes in Poe's work: death's intolerably enigmatic nature.

The two stories mentioned earlier, "MS." and "Shadow," suggest the way in which Poe repeatedly designed fictional experiments to see how close he could come to having a narrator speak from the vantage of the dead. Even "Mesmeric Revelation," in which the narrator hypnotizes and interviews a dying man, ends ambiguously with a question: "Had the sleepwaker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the region of the shadows?" (727).(1) Always in Poe there is a frustration of the effort to comprehend death; or else there is a clear tone of burlesque, as in "Loss of Breath" or "How to Write a Blackwood Article." Poe is never able seriously to domesticate death to the degree Cassuto proposes.

Even disregarding the evidence of Poe's other works, the idea that Death is the narrator of "Red Death" runs afoul of the image Poe gives of death near the end of the story--or rather the conspicuous lack of an image: "the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask" that the revelers tear from the intruding figure of the Red Death are "untenanted by any tangible form" (490). Mortality is terrifying for Poe because death resists all cognition and ends all communication.