Edgar Allan Poe - Biography

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The Red Death- by E.A. Poe

Questions


1. How was it possible to recognize the sick people?
2. What did the nobles do to keep the castle free from the disease?
3. What did Prince Prospero organize?
4. How were the diferent rooms decorated?
5. What happened before the clock ended its twelfth stroke?
6. Why was everybody disgusted with the mysterious masked man?
7. Who was the visitor? Why did he go to the castle?

Student's answers:

1. Sick people could be recognized because they had sharp pains, sudden fainting, heavy bleeding through the skin and red marks on the body.
2. The nobles heated and melted the locks of the gates. They closed everything and nobody could enter or leave the castle.
3. Prince Prospero organized an unusual grand mask dance to avoid thinking about the disease.
4. It was painted and decorated in seven different colours (blue, yellow, green,etc.) and the colours of the windows matched with the walls, but one room was different. The last one was painted in black and the window was red. All of them were lit from a fire made outside.
5. When the last stroke ended, people had diferent feelings: confusion, discomfort, fear .
6. Because everybody in the castle was there to escape from the sickness and his presence was taken as an offence. They thought it was not a good joke.
7. The read visitor. It went to the castle to take their lives.

Summary:

A terrible disease called the Red Death has struck the country. It's incredibly fatal, horribly gruesome, and it's already killed off half the kingdom. But the ruler of these parts, Prince Prospero, doesn't seem to care about his poor, dying subjects. Instead, he decides to let the kingdom take care of itself while he and a thousand of his favorite knights and ladies shut themselves up in a fabulous castle to have one never-ending party. Wine, women, music, dancing, fools – Prospero's castle has it all. After the last guest enters, no one else can get in – the Prince has welded the doors shut. That means no one can get out, either…

About five or six months into his stay, Prospero decides to have a spectacular masquerade ball (a ball where the guests where masks and costumes). The setup is weird and wild, just like the Prince who designs it. The ball takes place in a suite of seven rooms, each one dressed up in a different color: blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and black. The black room, which looks like death, is awfully creepy – it's got dark black walls, blood red windows, and big black clock which chimes so eerily every hour that everybody at the party stops dancing and laughs nervously. Most of the frolicking masqueraders are too weirded out to go into the black room.

Anyway, the party's in full swing and everybody's having a wild time when the clock strikes midnight. Everyone stops dancing and falls momentarily silent, as usual. Then some of the dancers notice a guest no one had seen before, wearing a scandalous costume. Whoever the new guest is, he's decided to dress as a corpse, a corpse who died of…the Red Death. He's so frighteningly lifelike (deathlike?) he freaks everybody out, and he slowly starts "stalking" through the frightened crowd. When Prince Prospero sees the ghostly guest, he's furious that someone would have the nerve to wear such a costume, and orders him to be seized and unmasked. But no one has the guts to do it, including Prospero himself.

The Red Death masquerader passes within a few feet of the Prince and starts to walk through the rooms, heading toward the black room. Prospero loses it and runs after him in a rage, drawing his dagger as he approaches. But just as Prospero reaches the edge of the black room, the corpselike guest suddenly whirls around to face him, and Prospero falls to the ground, dead. The shocked crowd throws itself at the guest, only to discover in horror that there's nothing underneath the mask and costume. The Red Death itself has come to the party. One by one the guests die, spilling their blood all over Prospero's lavish rooms. The candles go out, leaving only "darkness, decay, and the Red Death."