Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary drinking binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of th

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary drinking binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United States: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He was a magazine editor, a poet, a short story writer, a critic, and a lecturer. He introduced the British horror story, or the Gothic genre, to American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and literary criticism. Poe became a key figure in the nineteenth-century flourishing of American letters and literature. Famed twentieth--century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen named this period the American Renaissance. He argued that nineteenth-century American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman crafted a distinctly American literature that attempts to escape from the long shadow of the British literary tradition. Matthiessen paid little attention to Edgar Allan Poe. Although he long had a reputation in Europe as one of Americas most original writers, only in the latter half of the -twentieth century has Poe been viewed as a crucial contributor to the American Renaissance.

The often tragic circumstances of Poes life haunt his writings. His father disappeared not long after the childs birth, and, at the age of three, Poe watched his mother die of tuberculosis. Poe then went to live with John and Frances Allan, wealthy theatergoers who knew his parents, both actors, from the Richmond, Virginia, stage. Like Poes mother, Frances Allan was chronically ill, and Poe experienced her sickness much as he did his mothers. His relationship with John Allan, who was loving but moody, generous but demanding, was emotionally turbulent. With Allans financial help, Poe attended school in England and then enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1826, but he was forced to leave after two semesters. Although Poe blamed Allans stinginess, his own gambling debts played a large role in his fiscal woes. A tendency to cast blame on others, without admitting his own faults, characterized Poes relationship with many people, most significantly Allan. Poe struggled with a view of Allan as a false father, generous enough to take him in at age three, but never dedicated enough to adopt him as a true son. There are echoes of Poes upbringing in his works, as sick mothers and guilty fathers appear in many of his tales.

After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe spent some time in the military before he used his contacts in Richmond and Baltimore to enter the magazine industry. With little experience, Poe relied on his characteristic bravado to convince Thomas Willis White, then head of the fledgling Southern Literary Messenger, to take him on as an editor in 1835. This position gave him a forum for his early tales, including Berenice and Morella. The Messenger also established Poe as a leading and controversial literary critic, who often attacked his New England counterpartsespecially poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellowin the genteel pages of the magazine. Poe ultimately fell out of favor with White, but his literary criticism made him a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. Poe never realized his most ambitious dreamthe launch of his own magazine, the Stylus. Until his death, he believed that the New England literary establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus from being published.

His name has since become synonymous with macabre tales like The Tell-Tale Heart, but Poe assumed a variety of literary personas during his career. The Messengeras well as Burtons Gentlemans Magazine and Grahamsestablished Poe as one of Americas first popular literary critics. He advanced his theories in popular essays, including The Philosophy of Composition (1846), The Rationale of Verse (1848), and The Poetic Principle. In The Philosophy of Composition Poe explained how he had crafted The Raven, the 1845 poem that made him nationally famous. In the pages of these magazines, Poe also introduced of a new form of short fictionthe detective storyin tales featuring the Parisian crime solver C. Auguste Dupin. The detective story follows naturally from Poes interest in puzzles, word games, and secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in the pages of the Messenger to dazzle his readers. The word detective did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film. Dupin and his techniques of psychological inquiry have informed countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandlers Philip Marlowe.

Gothic literature, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human experiencedeath, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America. American Gothic literature dramatizes a culture plagued by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with various forms of insanity and melancholy. Poe, Americas foremost southern writer before William Faulkner, generated a Gothic ethos from his own experiences in Virginia and other slaveholding territories, and the black and white imagery in his stories reflects a growing national anxiety over the issue of slavery.

In the spectrum of American literature, the Gothic remains in the shadow of the dominant genre of the American Renaissancethe Romance. Popularized by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Romantic literature, like Gothic literature, relies on haunting and mysterious narratives that blur the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Poes embrace of the Gothic with its graphic violence and disturbing scenarios places him outside the ultimately conservative and traditional resolutions of Romantic novels such as Hawthornes The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

In Romances like the novels of Hawthorne, conflicts occur among characters within the context of society and are resolved in accordance with societys rules. Poes Gothic tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Poes longest work, the 1838 novel Arthur Gordon Pym, described in diary form a series of episodes on a journey to Antarctica. A series of bizarre incidents and exotic discoveries at sea, Pym lacks the cohesive elements of plot or quest that tie together most novels and epics and is widely considered an artistic failure. Poes style and concerns never found their best expression in longer forms, but his short stories are considered masterpieces worldwide. The Poes Gothic is a potent brew, best served in small doses.

Characters

The Cask of Amontillado

Montresor - The narrator, Montresor, murders Fortunato for insulting him by walling him up alive behind bricks in a wine cellar.

Fortunato - A wine expert murdered by Montresor. Dressed as a court jester, Fortunato falls prey to Montresors scheme at a particularly carefree moment during a carnival.

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

For the love of God, Montresor!

(See Important Quotations Explained)

Summary

The narrator, Montresor, opens the story by stating that he has been irreparably insulted by his acquaintance, Fortunato, and that he seeks revenge. He wants to exact this revenge, however, in a measured way, without placing himself at risk. He decides to use Fortunatos fondness for wine against him. During the carnival season, Montresor, wearing a mask of black silk, approaches Fortunato. He tells Fortunato that he has acquired something that could pass for Amontillado, a light Spanish sherry. Fortunato (Italian for fortunate) wears the multicolored costume of the jester, including a cone cap with bells. Montresor tells Fortunato that if he is too busy, he will ask a man named Luchesi to taste it. Fortunato apparently considers Luchesi a competitor and claims that this man could not tell Amontillado from other types of sherry. Fortunato is anxious to taste the wine and to determine for Montresor whether or not it is truly Amontillado. Fortunato insists that they go to Montresors vaults.

Montresor has strategically planned for this meeting by sending his servants away to the carnival. The two men descend into the damp vaults, which are covered with nitre, or saltpeter, a whitish mineral. Apparently aggravated by the nitre, Fortunato begins to cough. The narrator keeps offering to bring Fortunato back home, but Fortunato refuses. Instead, he accepts wine as the antidote to his cough. The men continue to explore the deep vaults, which are full of the dead bodies of the Montresor family. In response to the crypts, Fortunato claims to have forgotten Montresors family coat of arms and motto. Montresor responds that his family shield portrays a huge human foot dor, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel. The motto, in Latin, is nemo me impune lacessit, that is, no one attacks me with impunity.

Later in their journey, Fortunato makes a hand movement that is a secret sign of the Masons, an exclusive fraternal organization. Montresor does not recognize this hand signal, though he claims that he is a Mason. When Fortunato asks for proof, Montresor shows him his trowel, the implication being that Montresor is an actual stonemason. Fortunato says that he must be jesting, and the two men continue onward. The men walk into a crypt, where human bones decorate three of the four walls. The bones from the fourth wall have been thrown down on the ground. On the exposed wall is a small recess, where Montresor tells Fortunato that the Amontillado is being stored. Fortunato, now heavily intoxicated, goes to the back of the recess. Montresor then suddenly chains the slow-footed Fortunato to a stone.

Taunting Fortunato with an offer to leave, Montresor begins to wall up the entrance to this small crypt, thereby trapping Fortunato inside. Fortunato screams confusedly as Montresor builds the first layer of the wall. The alcohol soon wears off and Fortunato moans, terrified and helpless. As the layers continue to rise, though, Fortunato falls silent. Just as Montresor is about to finish, Fortunato laughs as if Montresor is playing a joke on him, but Montresor is not joking. At last, after a final plea, For the love of God, Montresor! Fortunato stops answering Montresor, who then twice calls out his enemys name. After no response, Montresor claims that his heart feels sick because of the dampness of the catacombs. He fits the last stone into place and plasters the wall closed, his actions accompanied only by the jingling of Fortunatos bells. He finally repositions the bones on the fourth wall. For fifty years, he writes, no one has disturbed them. He concludes with a Latin phrase meaning May he rest in peace.

Analysis

The terror of The Cask of Amontillado, as in many of Poes tales, resides in the lack of evidence that accompanies Montresors claims to Fortunatos thousand injuries and insult. The story features revenge and secret murder as a way to avoid using legal channels for retribution. Law is nowhere on Montresorsor Poesradar screen, and the enduring horror of the story is the fact of punishment without proof. Montresor uses his subjective experience of Fortunatos insult to name himself judge, jury, and executioner in this tale, which also makes him an unreliable narrator. Montresor confesses this story fifty years after its occurrence; such a significant passage of time between the events and the narration of the events makes the narrative all the more unreliable. Montresors unreliability overrides the rational consideration of evidence, such as particular occurrences of insult, that would necessarily precede any guilty sentence in a non-Poe world. The Cask of Amontillado takes subjective interpretationthe fact that different people interpret the same things differentlyto its horrific endpoint.

Poes use of color imagery is central to his questioning of Montresors motives. His face covered in a black silk mask, Montresor represents not blind justice but rather its Gothic opposite: biased revenge. In contrast, Fortunato dons the motley-colored costume of the court fool, who gets literally and tragically fooled by Montresors masked motives. The color schemes here represent the irony of Fortunatos death sentence. Fortunato, Italian for the fortunate one, faces the realization that even the carnival season can be murderously serious. Montresor chooses the setting of the carnival for its abandonment of social order. While the carnival usually indicates joyful social interaction, Montresor distorts its merry abandon, turning the carnival on its head. The repeated allusions to the bones of Montresors family that line the vaults foreshadow the storys descent into the underworld. The two mens underground travels are a metaphor for their trip to hell. Because the carnival, in the land of the living, does not occur as Montresor wants it to, he takes the carnival below ground, to the realm of the dead and the satanic.

To build suspense in the story, Poe often employs foreshadowing. For example, when Fortunato says, I shall not die of a cough, Montresor replies, True, because he knows that Fortunato will in fact die from dehydration and starvation in the crypt. Montresors description of his familys coat of arms also foreshadows future events. The shield features a human foot crushing a tenacious serpent. In this image, the foot represents Montresor and the serpent represents Fortunato. Although Fortunato has hurt Montresor with biting insults, Montresor will ultimately crush him. The conversation about Masons also foreshadows Fortunatos demise. Fortunato challenges Montresors claim that he is a member of the Masonic order, and Montresor replies insidiously with a visual pun. When he declares that he is a mason by showing his trowel, he means that he is a literal stonemasonthat is, that he constructs things out of stones and mortar, namely Fortunatos grave.

The final moments of conversation between Montresor and Fortunato heighten the horror and suggest that Fortunato ultimatelyand ironicallyachieves some type of upper hand over Montresor. Fortunatos plea, For the love of God, Montresor! has provoked much critical controversy. Some critics suggest that Montresor has at last brought Fortunato to the pit of desperation and despair, indicated by his invocation of a God that has long left him behind. Other critics, however, argue that Fortunato ultimately mocks the love of God, thereby employing the same irony that Montresor has effectively used to lure him to the crypts. These are Fortunatos final words, and the strange desperation that Montresor demonstrates in response suggests that he needs Fortunato more than he wants to admit. Only when he twice screams Fortunato! loudly, with no response, does Montresor claim to have a sick heart. The reasons for Fortunatos silence are unclear, but perhaps his willing refusal to answer Montresor is a type of strange victory in otherwise dire circumstances.

Important Quotations Explained

1. For the love of God, Montresor!

In The Cask of Amontillado, Fortunato addresses this pleahis last spoken wordsto Montresor, the man who has entombed him alive. Critics have long argued about the meaning of this quotation. On the one hand, some argue that Fortunato at last breaks down and, realizing the deathly import of the situation, resorts to a prayer for earthly salvation. Fortunato, according to this interpretation, maintains the hope that Montresor is playing a complex practical joke. The italicized words signal the panic in Fortunatos voice as he tries to redeem Montresor from the grip of evil. On the other hand, some critics assert that Fortunato accepts his earthly demise and instead mocks the capacity for prayer to influence life on Earth. In this interpretation, Fortunato recognizes his own misfortune and taunts Montresor with the mention of a God who has long ago deserted him. Just as the carnival represents the liberation from respectable social behavior in the streets above, the crypts below dramatize religious abandon and the violation of sacred humanity.

Montresors response of Yes, for the love of God! mocks Fortunato in his moment of desperate vulnerability. However, Fortunato refuses to acknowledge this final insult. On the verge of death, he uses silence as his final weapon. He recognizes that his unknowing participation in the entombment has given Montresor more satisfaction than the murder itself. When Montresor twice calls out Fortunato! he hears only the jingle of Fortunatos cap bells in response. The sense of panic shifts here from Fortunato to Montresor. Montresors heart grows sick as he realizes that Fortunato outwits him by refusing to play along anymore in this game of revenge. Montresor faces only the physical fact of the murder, and is stripped of the psychological satisfaction of having fooled Fortunato.

Analysis: Whats Up With the Title?

The title of this grim tale has an unusual ring to it. It doesnt sound like anything weve ever heard before. Its a mystery. But nothing to be scared of.

Well start with Amontillado. Literally, its an alcoholic beverage, closely related to sherry. Unless people have read Poes story, or are wine connoisseurs, they probably havent heard of it, much less seen a cask of it.

Casks, by the way, are barrels for storing wine or other drinks, and they come in many sizes. Montresor tells Fortunato he has a pipe of what passes for Amontillado. In this context, pipe and cask mean the same thing. As you may have suspected, cask also literally means casket. This is important because, though Fortunato seeks a cask of Amontillado, he finds a casket of death.

Now that we know the literal meaning of the title (barrel of wine) we can try to get at the figurative meaning or meanings. Why are we so sure there are figurative meanings? Because Poe says there are. About now, we should mention that Poe was very into what he called "secret writing."

The idea of secret writing is pretty simple: Youve done something terrible, or something terrible is happening to you. You have to tell somebody. So you write a letter to a friend. But, you want to make sure that if the wrong people intercept your letter, they wont be able to understand it. To solve this dark dilemma, you must write your letter in code. On the surface, your letter is about one thing. Underneath, or between the lines, its about something else entirely.

Heres another hint: Poes stories are strongly psychological. Everything in a Poe story represents an aspect of the human mind.

Poe tells us that there are figurative meanings, but he doesnt tell us what they are. We have to figure them out for ourselves, but he gives us lots of (really disgusting) clues! One way to get at this mysterious Amontillado is to consider what it means to each of our two characters.

For Fortunato, Amontillado symbolizes pleasure and enjoyment in the extreme. Hes willing to travel through the nastiest graveyards to get what he wants. He would probably do just about anything for it, but it betrays him. In the end, for Fortunato, Amontillado means imprisonment by his own desires. Hes trapped, and he cant do anything but die though, alternatively, death can be considered freedom from desire.

For Montresor, Amontillado means something slightly different. Instead of being ruled by it, he uses it to get what he wants, which is the power to make Fortunato feel his revenge permanently. In the end, Montresor is freed from his desire for revenge, at least. But is he really free?

Ironic

Irony probably doesnt sound very terrifying, but irony contributes hugely to the spine-tingling power of The Cask. You can find irony in every line of the story.

Critic and teacher Charles N. Nevi says that its a crime not to talk about irony when talking about The Cask. Irony basically means that somebody says one thing, but means the opposite. A good example is when there is only one stone left to fit into the wall, and Fortunato says, Let us be gone. This is ironic because hed have to be a complete fool to think Montresor is going to undo all those layers of bricks and let him out. Hes hoping against hope.

Montresors reply is even more ironic, Yes, let us be gone. Hes torturing Fortunato with his irony and has been all along. Come to think of it, hes been torturing us with irony, too. We never know if he means if he means what he says.

Irony is a kind of play. We arent talking about a stage production, but rather, the use of language in a playful way. In this case, the stylistic play is twisted and creepy.Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Everything takes on symbolic meaning in The Cask. Every detail seems to stand for something else, or to be flashing an encoded, and no doubt gruesome, message that we are compelled to decipher. The Montresor family coat of arms really stands out, though, for several reasons.

First lets break down the description. Picture a shield. On it is a picture of a giant gold human foot in a field azure i.e., a blue field. The foot is crush[ing] a wild and crazy serpent. The serpents fangs are buried in the foots heel. Seems obvious, right? Fortunato is a snake in the grass, he bit Montresor, and Montresors big gold foot is coming crashing down on him as a result.

Theres that motto to go with it: Nemo me impune lacessit. A quick search of the Internet reveals that this means no one attacks me with impunity and that its the motto of Scotland!

When we find this out, it becomes pretty obvious that the coat of arms is fabricated. Its Montresors fantasy of what he wants to have happen, and yet another hint that Fortunato doesnt get. But all that really tells us is what we already know: Montresor lies.

Whats really significant about the arms is the color azure. This is the only color explicitly mentioned that isnt connected to death and darkness. It literally means sky blue and sky means freedom, especially when we contrast it with the claustrophobic, prison-like atmosphere of the catacomb.

This also speaks to the theme Drugs and Alcohol. We know that Poe often used his fiction to explore his addictions, one of which was the drug laudanum. Laudanum comes from poppies often blue ones. The field azure on the arms could be a field of poppies. If so, it makes all that stuff about freedom seem ironic. If it represents addiction, it represents imprisonment, thus highlighting the storys tension between freedom and confinement.