The Cask of Amontillado

Introduction

Told in the first person by an Italian aristocrat, “The Cask of Amontillado” engages the reader by making him or her confidant to Montresor's macabre tale of revenge. The victim is Fortunato, who, the narrator claims, gave him a thousand injuries that he endured patiently, but when Fortunato dared insult him, he vowed revenge. It must be a perfect revenge, one in which Fortunato will know fully what is happening to him and in which Montresor will be forever undetected. To accomplish it, Montresor waits until carnival season, a time of “supreme madness,” when Fortunato, already half-drunk and costumed as a jester with cap and bells, is particularly vulnerable. Montresor then informs him that he has purchased a pipe of Amontillado wine, but is not sure he has gotten the genuine article.

He should, he says, have consulted Fortunato, who prides himself on being an expert on wine, adding that since Fortunato is engaged, he will go instead to Luchesi. Knowing his victim's vanity, Montresor baits him by saying that some fools argue that Luchesi's taste is as fine as Fortunato's. The latter is hooked, and Montresor conducts him to his empty palazzo and leads him down into the family catacombs, all the while plying him with drink. Through underground corridors with piles of skeletons alternating with wine casks, Montresor leads Fortunato, whose jester's bells jingle grotesquely in the funereal atmosphere.

In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida observes, "this movement of play, permitted by the lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementary" (289). I argue that it is exactly this prevalent absence residing at the center of the text that constitutes its essential meaning (or its lack).

In the deepest crypt there is a small recess, and there Montresor chains Fortunato to a pair of iron staples and then begins to lay a wall of stone and mortar, with which he buries his enemy alive. While he does so, he relishes the mental torment of his victim, whom he then leaves alone in the dark, waiting in terror for his death (Ketterer, David 1979).

“As mentioned previously, a traditional moralist will always be tempted to overlay his own principles on Poe's tales, in this story, expostulating the evils of drink, perhaps. And understandably, when such tenets reside at the core of one's belief structure, the temptation to perform moral judgment can be preemptory yet Poe's system of mind deserves our efforts to comprehend his system” (Silverman).Important Themes

Poe himself seems to have had a morbid fear of premature burial; it is a theme he dealt with repeatedly in such stories as “The Premature Burial,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” and “Morella,” all of which reverberate with a claustrophobic terror. He also turned again to walling up a victim in “The Black Cat.” The fear was that the buried person would still be conscious, aware of the enveloping horror. (McLuhan, Marshall)

“The Cask of Amontillado” belongs to the ...