What Is Reflected In The Masque Of The Red Death By George Zimmerman

One critic even notes:

The dancers and musicians alternate between maintaining their pose of light laughter and gaiety and, when the doleful, deep-voiced clock chimes, becoming pale, uneasy, and thoughtful. The clock is the reminder of death, the enemy, and time, his companion. The musicians smile when the striking stops. They repent of their "nervousness and folly" and promise each other to let "no similar emotion" be evinced at the next sounding of the hour. It is foolish to be nervous or to give in to a despairing emotion. (Wheat)

Since, as Wheat says, the clock is a reminder, and thus a symbol, of time and death, it deeply frightens the dancers with its hourly toll, causing them not only to freeze in place and go pale with fear, but also to think,
Since the clock already acts to represent time, the seven apartments also stand to signify time, in both the sense of the stages of life, as well as the time it took for its inhabitants to die after contracting the ‘Red Death’, with seven being the number of numbers on the face of a clock between the six and the twelve, inclusive of the numbers six and twelve themselves, thus denoting either the six hours of time from six o’clock to twelve; or in this case, midnight, when the story comes to its conclusion; or thirty minutes, which directly correlates to the time it takes a person to die after they have caught the disease. Considering that the clock of ebony acts as a symbol for the temporality of life, putting it in the black room, the symbol for the ending of life, makes all the more sense, and all the more reason for the people of the abbey to feel such anxiety towards this room and avoid it in any way possible, which goes on to further show man’s fear of