Narrator and point of view

“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe is a third-person narrative told by a narrator who is outside the events, but who seems to have extensive knowledge on the action and the characters: “It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held.”

The narrator even addresses the readership directly, implying that he already knows how the events will end. This shows that he is omniscient.

Because the narrator is omniscient, the entire story can be seen as a sort of landscape seen by the narrator from above, as if followed by an invisible camera or seen through a bird’s eye view. The omniscient narrator visualizes everything that happens in Prospero’s ballrooms all at once:

To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude...