SOURCE: “The Coy Reaper: Unmasque-ing the Red Death,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 317-20.

In the following excerpt, Cassuto suggests that Death himself is the narrator in Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death” and explores the thematic implications of this discovery.

Much has been written about Poe's narrators, and with good reason. Nearly always unnamed—and therefore seen as somehow unreliable—they also have disturbing tendencies that range from the unstable and the obsessed all the way to the insane.¹ In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and several other tales, Poe himself even enters into the fiction, commencing the atmosphere of confusion that pervades throughout. All of this indicates that Poe wants us to pay attention to his narrators. If that is his goal, he has succeeded handsomely, but not completely. “The Masque of the Red Death” is a notable exception.² The...