Edgar Allen Poe is known for his disturbing, disconcerting, and dark short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado” is no exception. The short story opens with a first-person narrator, Montresor, at a carnival festival. He recounts this tale from his past of hid nemesis-of-the-moment, a man named Fortunato. Both are present at this celebration of excess and indulgence, dressed in festive costume. By no accident on Poe’s part, Fortunato is outfitted colorfully as a jester—a fool. The troubled Montresor clarifies his motive for revenge that after an off-hand insult was hurled at him in the recent past by Fortunato, he pledged his, albeit extreme, revenge against the fool. A plan has been devised in the days before we meet the protagonist: Monstresor
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He plots revenge—not any revenge, murder—because an acquaintance has insulted him and inflicted a vague “thousand injuries.” These actions would not be taken by the average person, and demonstrate that anything that Montresor will tell us will be exaggerated by his warped sense of reality. In Montresor’s world, he is law—the creator and enforcer of justice. Moreover, retelling the story of his crime, decades after the actual incident, meaning the specifics of the events are most likely jumbled and blurred in his mind and therefore inaccurate …show more content…
Revenge, according to him is first, to “punish with impunity (Poe 215)” and second, the injurer must know what he did wrong. As previously stated, Montresor establishes himself as law and in this case, unlike in “The Tell-Tale Heart” his law appears to win out against, the law of the land and the legal law. Therefore he achieves his first point of revenge without impunity, he was not caught nor punished in any apparent way but, Fortunato seems oblivious to his ‘crimes;’ he acts amiably and without reservation towards Monstresor demonstrating no ill feelings. Likely, he forgot about the “thousand injuries” or didn’t see them as injuries at all. The latter, aligns with the unreliability of the narrator, wherein Montresor’s mind conjures up a hyperbolic perceptions of
He plots revenge—not any revenge, murder—because an acquaintance has insulted him and inflicted a vague “thousand injuries.” These actions would not be taken by the average person, and demonstrate that anything that Montresor will tell us will be exaggerated by his warped sense of reality. In Montresor’s world, he is law—the creator and enforcer of justice. Moreover, retelling the story of his crime, decades after the actual incident, meaning the specifics of the events are most likely jumbled and blurred in his mind and therefore inaccurate …show more content…
Revenge, according to him is first, to “punish with impunity (Poe 215)” and second, the injurer must know what he did wrong. As previously stated, Montresor establishes himself as law and in this case, unlike in “The Tell-Tale Heart” his law appears to win out against, the law of the land and the legal law. Therefore he achieves his first point of revenge without impunity, he was not caught nor punished in any apparent way but, Fortunato seems oblivious to his ‘crimes;’ he acts amiably and without reservation towards Monstresor demonstrating no ill feelings. Likely, he forgot about the “thousand injuries” or didn’t see them as injuries at all. The latter, aligns with the unreliability of the narrator, wherein Montresor’s mind conjures up a hyperbolic perceptions of