Question

[W]hile the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him.

What is the effect of parallelism in this excerpt?

A.It emphasizes the frantic spiral toward confrontation.

B.It emphasizes Prospero’s steady, confident approach.

C.It emphasizes the excessive opulence of the decor.

D.It emphasizes the rapid progression of time.

Answer 1

C is the correct answer.

Step-by-step explanation:

Took the test on edge

Answer 2

The correct answer is option letter C: It emphasizes the excessive opulence of the decor. Taken from the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1842), the purpose of using parallelism in this excerpt is to emphasize the opulent, colourful décor of the rooms. Parallelism is a method of writing in which similarly constructed clauses or sentences are arranged in a pairing sequence suggesting some correspondence between them. In this case, the repeated pairing sequence mentioning the colours is “through the … to the …” (through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white). Moreover, parallelism helps emphasize the importance of the colours, since they also portray the progression of life and its different stages in a symbolic way (blue: birth/ purple: youth/ green: adolescence/ orange: adulthood/ white: old age/ violet: imminent death).