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Overview: “The Cask of Amontillado”

Short story, 1846

American Writer ( 1809 - 1849 )

Characters in 19th-Century Literature. Ed. Kelly King Howes. Detroit: Gale, 1993. From Literature Resource Center.

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Plot

The story is told by an Italian aristocrat named Montresor, who claims he bore a thousand injuries from his fellow nobleman Fortunato, but that he finally received an unforgivable insult that had to be avenged. He waits until the carnival season, when the streets are disorderly with merrymaking, to pursue the perfect revenge. Meeting Fortunato, dressed in the brightly colored and bell-trimmed costume of a jester, he informs him that he has just purchased a quantity of Amontillado wine. He is not sure of the wine's authenticity, however, and admits that he should have asked Fortunato's advice before buying it (Fortunato is a wine connoisseur and takes inflated pride in his skill). Since Fortunato is busy, Montresor continues, he will ask another man, Luchesi, to evaluate the wine. This provokes his companion's ire, and Fortunato insists on sampling the Amontillado. He follows Montresor into the catacombs (an underground system of burial vaults) beneath his house, where the bones of his ancestors vie with his wine casks for space. The two proceed deeper and deeper into the gloomy catacombs, and Montresor repeatedly asks his friend if he would like to turn around, while he offers him swigs of wine. Finally they reach a particular alcove, and when Fortunato steps uncertainly into it, Montresor quickly chains him to iron staples on the wall. He ignores his victim's terrified wails—and even, at one point, matches them with mad screams of his own—and builds a wall of stone and mortar to seal off the recess. Eventually he hears Fortunato begin to laugh grimly, thinking Montresor is playing a practical joke on him. But Montresor puts the last stone in place. Fifty years later, he reports, the wall is still standing.

Characters

“The Cask of Amontillado” is one of the best-known short stories by Poe, considered a master of the genre and a major influence on its development. Although the tale employs the stereotypically gothic setting of dreary, dungeonlike catacombs lined with skeletons, it transcends the boundaries of gothic fiction with its psychological focus. The story also illustrates Poe's belief in “art for art's sake”; that is, a work of fiction need not contain a moral message but may derive value simply by being well-crafted and effective.

Like many of Poe's short stories, this one features a first-person narrator who, in relating his experiences, gives the reader many clues to his psychological makeup. Montresor is an Italian aristocrat who declares he has endured a thousand injuries from his fellow nobleman, Fortunato, but a recent insult will not go unavenged. Little else is revealed about Montresor's past or current circumstances, though he must have been fairly young when it took place (since fifty years pass before he relates it). His voice is intelligent, ironic (sometimes to the point of a horrible jocosity), and burning with a cold passion. Montresor's maniacal pride and sadomasochistic tendencies are gradually more apparent, and finally his gruesome intention becomes clear. He makes the reader his confidante, and he assumes the reader appreciates and approves of his clever act; thus Montresor explains how he planned and executed his perfect crime. He waits for a day when the city is preoccupied with the gay pursuits of carnival, ensnares his victim with an appeal to his vanity, and leads him deep into the catacombs while pretending concern that the dampness of the underground passages will adversely effect Fortunato's health. Reaching the fatal alcove, he quickly binds his victim with chains and begins constructing the wall that will trap him there for eternity. Immune to Fortunato's terrified screams, he even matches those wails himself at one point and brandishes his sword; such bizarre behavior evidences his mental instability. Montresor has been labeled a rationalist with no concern for the moral implications of his behavior; a monomaniac who, like the protagonists created by such authors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, has allowed his hatred to devour his soul and therefore his humanity; and as another example of the abnormal, neurotic personalities frequently found in Poe's works. In any case, the end of the story reveals not only that his crime was never detected, but that he has remained obsessed with it for fifty years.

Through Montresor's victim, the aristocratic Fortunato, Poe plays out the theme of premature burial that he uses with terrifying effect elsewhere in his fiction and that seems to have been a particularly dreadful concept for him. Little is learned about Fortunato or what he might have done to provoke Montresor's ire. Although his portrayal is rather negative—he is drunk when he meets his murderer and seems vain and arrogant—there is little evidence that he deserves his gruesome fate. He does not even seem aware that he has offended Montresor. Montresor claims that Fortunato is much respected and feared, but that his one weakness is his excessive pride in his wine connoisseurship; it is this weakness that Montresor brilliantly exploits to lure him into a trap. Both Fortunato's name and his ludicrous jester costume, the bells of which jingle grotesquely in the catacombs, are ironic touches that help to intensify the story's effect. The period in which he waits for Montresor to finish building the wall concentrates the terror and claustrophobia of Fortunato's approaching death. His final, pathetic attempt to ascribe Montresor's actions to a practical joke implies that there is a Lady Fortunato and appreciative friends waiting for him at his palazzo.