The irony here is that the crime he failed to commit -- the killing of this cat -- led to the narrator's doom. The irony is heightened in "The Cask of Amontillado" because the entire time the narrator, who is looking back on the incident fifty years later, evinces no lack of confidence or surety until the very end, where his feelings of guilt become suddenly and drastically clear. Even though the ultimate end of the story is pretty much foretold at the beginning as far as plot is concerned, the internal effects on the narrator create an ending that is ironically more unnerving than his external actions (Henninger 35).
Both of these stories also clearly illustrate the way guilt and punishment necessarily follow crime. The narrators of both stories end up feeling guilty for their actions, and both are surprised by their fates. In "The Black Cat," the narrator acts impulsively in each of his murderous acts, and even at the end is left feeling somewhat shocked by the turn of events -- but guilt and punishment find him even when he least expects it. In The Cask of Amontillado," the narrator is anything but surprised by his actions -- he shows himself to be a very capable and cool-headed murderer, which is why he gets away with his dastardly deed (Baraban 48). But despite the length of his planning and the careful execution of his plot, the narrator still finds himself with noticeable feelings of guilt -- it is an inescapable facet of human existence, in the world of Poe's story.
The similarities of these stories do not end with the details of their plots...
Darkness and Decay Within the Walls: Poe's Architecture Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Masque of the Red Death present a gothic setting, within which the action of the tale takes place. Each of the houses is not only decaying, but somewhat bizarre. As the tale unfolds, an unhealthy relationship between the structure and its inhabitants is revealed. The story Ligeia takes place in two Gothic locations: first,
Good Man is Hard to Find For the purposes of this essay, I chose Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." "A Good Man is Had to Find" is an apt topic for research such as this, because the ambiguity of the story's position regarding a grandmother ultimately responsible for the death of her entire family leads to a wide variety of possible readings, each with
It is only through occult understanding that the forms and the archetypal images and symbols can be interpreted. Here we see that the term unconsciousness is very similar to the Platonic ideals and forms. Another aspect that will form part of the theoretical perspective of this study is the concept of transformation. In order to understand the occult and its relationship to the forms, a process of transformation has to
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