And Contrast A Good Man Is Hard To Find And The Cask Of Amontillado

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” each follow a series of events that eventually leads to the narrator of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” being murdered and the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado” murdering. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is told from the grandmother of a family’s point of view and tells of the family making a trip to Florida. On the way, they turn onto a side road, crash their car, and are shot and killed by The Misfit, a wanted criminal who is on the run. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” follows the narrator Montresor as he plans to seek revenge on Fortunato who insulted Montresor so irreparably that Montresor must now kill him. Montresor coaxes Fortunato into the …show more content…
O’Connor uses foreshadowing in order to create suspense about what is ahead in the story. The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” foreshadows the outcome of the story while saying “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida…” while thinking about her family’s upcoming trip to Florida (O’Connor 141). She then brings The Misfit up later in conversation with Red Sammy, the owner of The Tower (O’Connor 144). Poe openly states Montresor’s intentions in the first paragraph when Montresor thinks “I must not only punish, but punish with impunity”(Poe 1126). Throughout the rest of the story, Montresor slowly leads Fortunato to his eventual demise. Both Poe and O’Connor use suspense to make their stories darker as they lead up to …show more content…
In “The Cask of Amontillado” Montresor mentions that that Fortunato had “ventured upon insult”(Poe 1126). Montresor then vowed to have revenge and proceeded to kill Fortunato. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the murderer, The Misfit, murdered the grandmother and her family for his own enjoyment. The grandmother had already read in an article that The Misfit had done something horrible to previous victims for which he had been jailed so The Misfit was capable of serious and disturbing crime (O’Connor 141). After the family had their accident The Misfit could easily have ignored them and continued on. However, he chose to stop and then toy with the family as they were looking for assistance. Then he proceeded to slowly kill them in pairs. The Misfit had no reason to stop at the wreckage, especially concerning his own privacy considering he was on the run, and from then on murdered the family for enjoyment. These stories both contain murder but each has its own