Read the excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." [While 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? It emphasizes the frantic spiral toward confrontation. It emphasizes Prospero's steady.confident approach. It emphasizes the excessive opulence of the decor. It emphasizes the rapid progression of time.

## Step 1<br />The first step in solving this problem is to understand what parallelism is. In literature, parallelism is a rhetorical device that involves using the same grammatical structure in a series of phrases or sentences. This technique is used to emphasize a particular idea or theme.<br /><br />## Step 2<br />Next, we need to analyze the excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death". The excerpt describes a character's movement through a series of rooms, each with a different color. The character is a parallel structure, with each sentence following the same pattern: "through the [color] chamber to the [next color]".<br /><br />## Step 3<br />Finally, we need to determine the effect of this parallelism. The parallel structure emphasizes the character's steady and confident approach, as he moves through each room with the same "solemn and measured step". This is in contrast to the other options, which suggest a frantic spiral, excessive opulence, or rapid progression of time, none of which are directly emphasized by the parallel structure in the excerpt.