Jayden
The Lottery/ The Masque of the Red Death Synthesis Essay
Two stories with similar symbolic and ironic elements and are Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”. These stories are both rather disturbing and unpredictable in the events that play out, so it is no wonder how they are very similar, but still distinct. Firstly, comparing the symbolic meanings of several items in the stories show how similar and yet different these two tales are. The two most similar symbols in the two stories are the lottery box and black dot from “The Lottery” and the Red Death itself in “Masque of the Red Death”. These symbols represent death and pain. In “The Lottery”, whomever obtains to paper with the black dot is subjected to stones pelted at them, while in “The Masque”, the Red Death causes “sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution” (1) , both rather gruesome and horrible ways to die. They can also be symbols…show more content… Two similar ironic elements in the stories are the Summer family in “The Lottery” and Prince Prospero in “The Masque”. The word “Summer” often evokes happy thoughts and images, yet in “The Lottery”, “the lottery [is] conducted… by Mr. Summers” (1). Someone with the name of “Summers” that sets up an awful event such as the lottery is certainly very ironic. In “The Masque”, Prince Prospero locks himself and several other wealthy people in a castle to escape from the Red Death. However, it is impossible to truly escape death, so him and everyone else in the castle drops dead when the Red Death infiltrates the party. This is ironic because even with how hard Prospero tried to avoid it, he could not escape death. The reason these two ironic situations are similar is because they both lead to someone (or in “The Masque”’s case, everyone)
