Introduction

If anyone was ever a master of gothic horror it was Poe.  “The Cask of Amontillado” is one of Poe’s most famous short stories:  brutal, quick, vengeful, and unabashedly horrific, the story represents all that is most terrifying and prideful about the human condition.  In this article, we’ll give you a dozen topics you could use to write a paper on this story.  We’ll also give a summary, analysis, a short list of characters (hey, there are only 2), some good quotes, and an overview of the themes.  Get ready—get set—get gothic!

Related Topics

The Revenge Plot

Montresor identifies his thirst for revenge in the opening of the story.  The rest of the narrative is the playing out of the revenge plot, which unfolds slowly and deliberately.  The reader is never fully aware of what the revenge will be until the very end, which is why the story is so effective at leaving an impression upon the reader.  Were the full extent of Montresor’s plan revealed to the reader up front, it would leave no room for dramatic tension or for anticipation to develop.  Montresor’s revenge is hinted at but only fully realized when he begins stacking brick upon brick and sealing up the doomed Fortunato in the cellar.  This ending is made all the more effective because of its extremeness:  the reader has never really been made aware of the depth of the insult that Montresor has suffered—and this kind of reaction seems so over the top that it terrifies the reader.

Murder

Murder is one of Poe’s favorite themes to explore.  He often explores it by describing the psychological impact of murder upon the offender.  Here, however, he simply contents himself with describing a carefully calculated and executed murder plot.  The tension is not situated in the psychological trauma of committing murder, as is the case in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but rather in the need to see the plot through to completion.  

Subterfuge

Trickery and deceit are rampant in the story.  Montresor uses the cask of Amontillado as a ruse to dupe the wine-loving Fortunato into descending into the dank, dark cellars of Montresor’s home to taste the vintage.  By using deceit, Montresor acts like the devious serpent, who tricks Eve into biting into the forbidden fruit.  This serpent is depicted in Montresor’s crest, which further gives weight to the argument that Montresor is really a snake in disguise—a wolf in sheep’s clothing—a man with a deceitful heart, who is not to be trusted.

Carnival

The story is set “about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season”—a season wherein revelers put on costumes and partake of festivities in the town.  It is the perfect time for Montresor to take revenge, for it gives him the chance to send his servants away and have an empty house for when Fortunato comes over.  It also offers a feverish backdrop that gives him the advantage in terms of wits:  he is cold, calculated and staid; Fortunato is drunk, unsuspecting and mirthful.

Wine

The Amontillado is an old vintage of wine that is a type of sherry.  It can be an ambiguous wine, whose fermentation process is a bit more complex than normal wines.  For that reason, it takes a true connoisseur to assess it.  In “The Cask of Amontillado,” the wine is constantly flowing and is used to keep Fortunato drunk.  If you wanted to focus on wine and how it is important to the story, the allure of alcohol and its trappings is a good place to start.

Pride

 The crest of the Montresor family—a foot stomping a snake with the motto being “No one attacks me with impunity”—is an indication of the pride of Montresor and a hint at the motive for his revenge.  However, pride is an issue for both Montresor and Fortunato.  Indeed, Fortunato’s pride regarding being the greatest wine connoisseur is what allows Montresor to dupe his foe into descending into his cellars.  Montresor’s pride and vanity is thus pitted against Fortunato’s—and as the latter is unsuspecting of the trap being laid for him (and is also completely drunk), the savage Montresor is able to execute his plan and wall up his “frenemy.”  Why does he do it?  He reveals his reasoning in the first line of the story:  Fortunato had “ventured upon insult”—and that was all.

A slight hint of Fortunato’s insulting ways is given.  When Fortunato is talking of being a Mason and Montresor declares that he is one, too, Fortunato acts astonished as though Montresor could never be of the same club as he:  “You? Impossible! A mason?” declares the unbelieving Fortunato.  But, of course, he is correct:  Montresor reveals that he meant he is only a brick-layer and not part of Fortunato’s secret inner circle.  Perhaps this kind of insulting tone is what has driven the proud Montresor to murder the vain Fortunato.

Gothic Horror

The gothic horror genre of fiction got started in the 18th century.  Writers in this genre tended to focus on the supernatural.  Ghost stories, haunted castles made up the typical fare.  Poe, in the middle of the 19th century, turned the gothic genre inward:  he focused more on the psychological aspects of the horrifying and terrifying parts of humanity.  Poe did not need to rely on ghosts to fill his reader with terror:  he recognized that there was more than enough ammunition in the human soul.

Lack of a Guilty Conscience

In some of Poe’s stories—such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”— there is a haunting sense of guilt that the main character experiences in dramatic form.  In “The Cask of Amontillado,” there is no such sense of guilt.  Poe’s Montresor appears completely without concern for his eradication of Fortunato.  He is similar to Shakespeare’s Iago, who acts abominably without remorse or compunction.

There is a moment at the end of the story wherein Poe gives a slight suggestion that the murderous intention of Montresor is filling him with guilt as he places the last bricks in the wall, sealing Fortunato’s fate:  Montresor tells the reader, “My heart grew sick”—but the narrator, instead of chalking this sickness up to the fact that he is killing his friend, simply shrugs... s off the feeling, distancing himself from the act, by stating callously, “It was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so.”  In other words, Montresor shows none of the guilt that usually accompanies the act of murder in a Poe story!

Immurement

People tend to be buried alive in a lot of Poe’s stories.  Technically, it’s called immurement—a type of imprisonment for life which equates to being buried alive.  Fortunato is sealed up in a tomb deep in a cellar.  In other works by Poe, such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Black Cat,” one can find similar situations.

Foreshadowing

Throughout the story, Montresor foreshadows the doom that awaits Fortunato.  He points to the “white web-work” of the nitre on the walls of the cellar—an image that doubles for Montresor’s plot, which is to catch Fortunato in a web from which he cannot escape.  Then there is the foreshadowing of the method by which the plot will be executed:  the trowel that Montresor holds up when declaring that he is a mason:  it is the murder weapon—for Montresor will erect a wall to seal up Fortunato.  Fortunato’s immurement is foreshadowed, too, by the “flagon of De Grave” which is his last drink on earth—the name of De Grave literally meaning “of the grave.”  Finally, the bones along the walls signify what’s in store for Fortunato:  his will be joining theirs imminently.

Double Meaning

The crest of Montresor depicts a foot stepping on a serpent that is sinking its fangs into the heel of the foot.  At first, the reader is likely to think that the foot represents Montresor because of the character’s desire to crush Fortunato.  But on second thought, it might be that Montresor is actually the snake, biting into the foot of Fortunato who, according to the narrator, has wronged him.  In either case, it is but one example of double meaning in the story. 

Another is the play on words of “mason”—Fortunato means “Freemason” when he makes reference to being a Mason, and, when Montresor says that he is also a mason but fails to recognize the Masonic hand sign that Fortunato makes, Montresor holds up his trowel and declares that he is the brick-laying kind of mason.  It is a moment of foreshadowing that Poe is able to eke out of the double meaning in the term mason.

“Motiveless Malignity”

The phrase belongs to the Romantic Era poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  He used it to describe the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello.  Iago tells the audience that he is in the mood for revenge against his boss Othello because he feels he was passed over for promotion and that, besides this suspicion, there are rumors that Othello might have cuckolded him.  In other words, there are no good reasons for the horrific acts that Iago engages in to destroy Othello—just a kind of motiveless malignity—which is a nice-sounding phrase that Coleridge uses to describe evil.  The same “motiveless malignity,” however, could certainly be applied to Montresor, whose reasons for revenge are never fully explored and seem somewhat ill-fitted to the type of revenge that is plotted and executed.

Summary

It is Carnival night and Montresor has dismissed his servants to attend the festivities.  With an empty home, he can execute his plan:  revenge on Fortunato.  He finds Fortunato at the Carnival and casually drops the information that he has a cask that is supposedly Amontillado but is unsure whether it truly is this wine.  He says he knows Fortunato would be able to tell but that, since he is busy with Carnival, Luchresi will do.  Fortunato’s pride is pricked and he asserts that Luchresi is an imposter.  Thus Montresor secures Fortunato:  the two head back to the house and into Montresor’s cellars.  Montresor leads Fortunato way into the back where the crypts are and makes sure that Fortunato is too drunk along the way to question why the Amontillado would be so deep in the vaults.  Once they arrive at the very rear of the vaults, Montresor claps chains around Fortunato, who is too stunned, drunk and confused to realize he has been tricked.  Only once Montresor begins laying bricks to seal up the niche does Fortunato realize he is being immured.  Montresor finishes walling up Fortunato’s tomb, sealing him alive. 

The story is told from Montresor’s point of view, some fifty years after events have passed.  Montresor is looking back on the story as an old man, indicating that he has indeed lived a long life after the murder of his friend, whom he killed because he felt insulted by him.  There is no hint that Montresor has suffered psychologically from his murderous revenge on his friend. 

Analysis

Poe’s story is a straight-forward affair:  it does not use allegory to drive the plot or rely on the supernatural to advance the dramatic tension.  It does not even delve into the psychological torture that so many of his gothic characters experience.  It is simply a tale told by an old man looking back on a particular action he took in his younger days in order to right a wrong, as he puts it. 

As the tale is told by Montresor, one might well wonder whether he is a reliable narrator.  There is none of the rambling, incoherent, broken patterns of thought that typify the stream-of-consciousness style represented by some of Poe’s madmen.  For that reason, Montresor distinguishes himself if, in fact, he is mad.  However, he conducts himself with such genius and tells the story with such exquisite perfection and with an ear for drama that it would more than likely be remiss to characterize him as insane or as an unreliable narrator.

The horror of the tale does not stem from any impacts of psychological guilt or from any haunting of the main character by the ghost of the friend he murders.  No, the horror stems from the fact that the main character is so accepting of this course of action and so calculating and efficient at executing his revenge.  Montresor stands among some of the most notorious villains in all of literature—Iago, Dracula, Anton Chigurh—for he allows himself to feel no compunction about what he does.  He is, rather, satisfied by his revenge and feels that in immuring Fortunato he has righted the wrong the latter committed by insulting him.

Characters

Montresor

The narrator of the story, Montresor recounts the time he took revenge upon his friend Fortunato…