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 Poewrote "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: Unmasqueing 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.

Moreover, if we were to accept Death as the narrator of "Red Death," we would have to imagine the Grim Reaper chattily showing off his knowledge of the latest in French theater. That sounds more like Woody Allen than Edgar Allan Poe, or else like Poe in a much lighter mood than the grim tone and subject matter of "Red Death" indicate.

Geoffrey Gait Harpham, in his book On the Grotesque, offers another reading: "This tale, like many Poe works, is concerned with the implications of narrative, of the process of rendering into artifact and the living death granted by this process." Harpham calls the narrator "an undercover agent working for the plague," and says that "[p]ursuing this narrative we experience 'read' deaths." After the narrator's last first-person reference two thirds of the way through the tale, he becomes "a bodiless voice," and then goes himself one better and "expires" at the end, since "[l]ife is synonymous with articulation and death with silence" (Harpham 117).

Notwithstanding Cassuto's mild objection that Harpham's reading "treats the narrator as a strategy, not as a character" (318), a relatively abstract, strategic reading may well offer us some insight into "The Masque of the Red Death." But Harpham leaves an important question unanswered: What is the rhetorical effect of the narrator's projecting himself beyond the end of the story--beyond the point at which Harpham says he expires--by means of the reference to Hernani?

As I have already noted, the Hernani reference gives the narrator a strange then-and-now quality. This temporal duplicity indicates a more general inside-and-outside dual status. On the one hand, the narrator must be inside the story (and the abbey) as a witness to events. On the other hand, the narrator is outside the story as a reporter of events. As a witness the narrator is contained by the story, while as a reporter he contains the story.

The narrator is rather like the braziers of fire set on tripods in the "closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite" where Prospero holds his masque ball (486). The fires create the illusion of daylight streaming through the windows from outdoors, but are actually enclosed within Prospero's bizarre architectural scheme. Likewise, the narrator illuminates and reveals the story's events, seemingly from without, but actually from within.

The importance of the narrator's ambivalent exterior/interior status is that it allows him deviously to "overlook" the fact that he should have died at the end of the story. The reporter conveniently forgets that he must also have been a witness. This narrative booby trap is as pointed as it is mischievous because it advances the grave theme of the story.

"The Masque of the Red Death" is a vanitas tale, a memento mori. More specifically, it is about the failure of art to stave off death. The fact that the narrator overlooks the necessity of his own death mirrors and mocks the cherished illusions of immortality that art gives to both artist and audience. These illusions are vividly dramatized within the tale. Prospero and his guests attempt to immure themselves safely within a world of art, but their ball becomes a danse macabre. The guests depend on art so much that it virtually animates them: when the orchestra stops playing, they freeze in terror. For most of the revelers, art is a sort of whistling in the dark, and they avoid Prospero's ominously furnished seventh chamber like the plague, dreading the hourly toll of its giant clock. But there is also the suggestion that the rare, sensitive soul may appreciate Prospero's memento mori: "and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments" (488). Poe thus invites the reader to join him and Prospero in their aesthetic contemplation of mortality.

At first it may strike us as odd that in his attempt to escape death Prospero includes the grim seventh room, "shrouded in black velvet tapestries," glazed with windows of "scarlet--a deep blood color," and containing the terrifying clock (486). But while on one level the seventh chamber shows that Prospero, like Poe, has his doubts about the success of his escape, on another level the seventh chamber is part of the escape. For while a memento mori confronts us with our mortality, it also sets that mortality at a distance: the aesthetic distance. By representing death, art creates the comforting illusion that death is just one of art's illusions.

Doubling Poe, Prospero attempts to control death by fitting it into his own work as a motif rather than as a reality. But a memento mori's controlled and distanced image of death must fail in the end, and to Prospero's dismay the reality of death intrudes upon his masquerade.

To underscore the fact that his own art must fail just as Prospero's does, Poe sabotages "Red Death" by means of its impossible narrator. We recognize that we cannot successfully imitate the narrator's trick, for unlike him we are flesh and blood: time and death will not pause to see whether we remember their inevitability. The narrator is thus a fly in the soothing ointment of aesthetic distance, figuring and ridiculing both the author's and the reader's hope of escape into art.

The irony of all this is that the cynical message of "Red Death" is at odds with its own power as a work of art. As J. Gerald Kennedy says, "Poe's engagement with the life of writing marks, in its sardonic way, a resistance to the fatality of his own vision" (ix). "The Masque of the Red Death" lays bare the impotent illusions of art, but does this so artistically that our faith in art is ironically restored in the very same moment that it is lost. Thus the story simultaneously criticizes and confirms us in our own uneasy duplicity.

1 Similarly, in Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," the narrator mesmerizes the dying Valdemar, who then claims (and appears) to be dead. Roland Barthes's "Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Poe" explores some implications of the utterance "I am dead" in "Valdemar"; but as Barthes notes, the essential facts of the story"can . . . be reduced to two points: the uttering of the 'I am dead' and the abrupt liquefaction of the dead man at the moment of his hypnotic awakening" (11). Characteristically, Poe gives liquefaction the last word, subverting his own subversion of death.

Barthes, Roland. "Textual Analysis of a Tale By Edgar Poe." Trans. Donald G. Marshall. Poe Studies 10 (1977): 1-12.

Cassuto, Leonard. "The Coy Reaper: Unmasque-ing the Red Death." Studies in Short Fiction 25 (1988): 317-20.

Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. "Permeability and the Grotesque: 'The Masque of the Red Death.'" On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982. 106-21.

Kennedy, J. Gerald. Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.