Death in American Literature: Critical Essay by Leonard Cassuto

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.