Thoughts of death are usually frightening. Even more frightening is the knowledge that every living thing will expire at some time. Edgar Allen Poe uses the characters, setting, and symbolism of "The Masque of the Red Death" to say that dying is something no one can escape. Death is inevitable for all things, no matter how hard they try to escape it.
             The character of Prince Prospero helps the reader of "The Masque of the Red Death" to understand the certainty that every life must end eventually. Prospero is wealthy and prosperous, hence the name, but "he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among knights and dames of his court, and with these he retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys".(302) In other words, he locks himself and a few friends in his home, where he stays for several months. While the rest of the world was dealing with the threat of the plague, Prospero "entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence."(302) Though the Red Death did not take him, Prospero still embraced death by his own hand. After hiding in the abbey for all those months, the friends of Prospero were taken by the Red Death in the end.
             The setting of "The Masque of the Red Death" also contributes to Poe's theme of the inevitability of death. The story takes place inside the abbey in which Prospero isolates himself and his friends during the time of the plague, or The Red Death. The action takes place inside the abbey's imperial suite, which contains seven distinctly colored rooms. The last room is described with much greater detail than the others.
             "The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, filling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the wind
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