In life, numerous people believe that they are entitled to more things than others are. For example, celebrities believe they should be able to participate in more extravagant events, own more prestige items, and sometimes even live longer than the poor, just because they have more money. While living there is nothing us humans can do to put people like this in their place but there is one force that can; death. Death is the great equalizer which is shown through The Masque of the Red Death. At the end of our long party of life, everyone becomes of equal importance.
In The Masque of the Red Death Prince Prospero and all of his friends party while his people are suffering from the Red Death. The prince gathered 1,000 of his closest friends to his castle to be safe and entertained, by a ball, while his citizens die. By this action, Price Prospero is holding himself to a higher class than the rest of his citizens. He is constructing this idea that the higher class is entitled to live a healthier and safer life. Once death catches up with the prince, there are no more classes, he and all of his dead citizens are all equal. .
The castle where the ball is held acquires 7 chambers, each one being a different color. These colors represent the 7 stages of man. Every single human, whether rich or poor, girl or boy, black or white, goes through all of these phases through their journey of life. All the members at this party walk through every chamber throughout the night. They start with the first chamber which is blue and end with the last chamber which is black. This action is metaphoric to the first and last stages of life. The color blue represents life and black represents death, all the other colored chambers in between represent the other stages through our cycle of life. .
If you look at many short stories, they follow different types of archetypal plot patterns just like The Masque of the Red Death follows one.
