Jac’s Comments (group member since Mar 25, 2020)

Jac’s comments from the UWM Libraries' Book Lovers Short Story Club group.

I would say Prospero is an antagonist. An out-of-touch noble who locks himself and a bunch of his friends in an opulent castle full of all kinds of luxuries while we're told over half of the people in his country are dead or dying? Sounds like an antagonist to me. I think Poe is an author who had death pretty heavily on his mind, given how many people close to him died or were dying, and I think he took comfort in knowing that rich people can't escape death no matter what they do.

Poe was orphaned very young and raised by wealthy family friends, who were at times generous and at other times very tight-fisted with their money as far as he was concerned. Once he reached adulthood, they cut him off completely and he was left penniless. He had gambling problems, struggled to make money as a writer because of the lack of consistent copyright laws at the time, and spent much of his life writing people to ask for money. He was, in other words, your standard starving artist, but because of his upbringing, he had a sense of what the "haves" in society lived like and was a lot more aware of the injustice of inequality than I suspect a lot of his peers would have been.

Prospero (prosperous, anyone?) is meant to be a villain, I'd say. He abandons his people when they need him most and is "happy" because he thinks he's safe. His death from the plague shows that for all the rich may try to outrun death, for all of the money they throw around while regular people suffer, they will all die too. As Poe's wife had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis and his behavior was becoming more erratic as he drank more and continued to struggle to find work, only being paid $9 (~$200 today) for The Raven, I think he probably enjoyed writing about wealthy people like his adoptive father dying of an awful plague just like everyone else. Can't say I blame him.

There's a website based on this story!

"If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be - including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books."