What is the central theme of the story? Support your answer with textual evidence.

While this story is literally about a pestilence called the Red Death, it can be read at an allegorical level as a tale about man's fear of his own mortality. In the story, Prince Prospero and his "thousand friends" seal themselves into an abbey of his castle in an attempt to "defy contagion" and escape the clutches of the Red Death. The Prince employs "all the appliances of pleasure" in order to distract his guests both from the suffering and death outside their walls and from thoughts of their own vulnerability to the Red Death. The Prince's actions symbolize the ways in which all humans tend to focus on material pleasures in order to distract themselves from the knowledge that everyone, including themselves, eventually must die.

The fact that the Red Death slips in "like a thief in the night" to claim the lives of everyone present symbolizes the fact that no one, not even the powerful and wealthy, can escape death, which eventually claims all mortals. Just as everyone must eventually "face" the fact of their own mortality, the Prince dies the moment he literally "faces" his own Death, and can no longer deny its presence in his castle.