Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe are often thought to have different themes in their writings, but in reality they have extremely similar themes. In Hawthorne's "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" and Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," one theme is incredibly important. Death is inevitable and when you try to escape death, you always find it hidden behind another corner. Death can be avoided by hiding behind a barrier or attempting to overcome it, but you will always fail and have a limited time before you reach it. Hiding behind a barrier, physical or emotional, has always been the first line of defense in escaping death. In "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," Widow Wycherly, Colonel Killigrew, Mr. Medbourne, and Mr. Gascoigne hide from their old age and impending death by drinking water from the Fountain of Youth: "Age, with the its miserable train of worries and pains and illnesses, was remembered only as the anguish of a dream, from which they had awakened with joy" (Hawthorne 9). The four companions all took refuge in a corner of their minds, and saw themselves in their own distorted reality. They bury themselves deeper and deeper into this alternative dimension of youth. “'We are younger, but we are still too old! Quick, give us more!' ” (Hawthorne 7). Once presented with another defense against impending death, they do everything they can to include it in their arsenal. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero shares the same feeling of invincibility. He closes himself and his companions in his fortified abbey, in the hope that the Red Death will not overtake them: "When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand healthy and carefree friends among the knights and ladies of his court, a ... middle of paper ......since Prospero pulled himself out, he condemned all who were locked up with him: "And one by one they made the revelers fall into the bloody halls of their revelry, and died each in the position despairing of his fall" (Poe 7). All the thousand subjects he had kept with him in his abbey were subjected to the same punishment. While both the four friends and Prince Prospero had different initial outcomes after their first failed attempt to avoid death, they share a common end result. Whether you look at the evidence presented about avoiding death by hiding behind barriers, or attempting to defeat death, you can clearly see that escaping death is impossible and will always lead to failure. No matter how hard you try, you cannot escape death. Before attempting to escape death, one should reflect on how gifted one is to be given a life.