"The Cask of Amontillado"
Date: 1846
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
From: Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature.
A classic tale of vengeance and premature burial first printed in the November 1846 issue of
Godey's Lady's Book, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" has been labeled his most
perfect short work for its blend of irony and dark humor with horror. Aficionados of the author's
work recognized in its gleeful vengeance a fictional comeuppance to Thomas Dunn English, an
amateur poet who parodied "The Black Cat" (1843) and circulated vicious libels in the New
York Mirror. Later analysis connected the death madness in the story with Poe's fears for his
dying wife, Virginia Clemm Poe, who suffered a five-year battle with tuberculosis. The story
inspired Argentine, French, and German films, none of which captured its masterful
psychological insight.
Told in flashback half a century after the event, the moody, suspenseful narrative takes place in
Italy during carnival season on the eve of Lent. Poe may have heard the core of the plot in 1827
while he was stationed with the army at Fort Independence, near Boston Harbor. According to an
anecdote related in Austin N. Stevens's Mysterious New England (1971), some soldiers waylaid a
Captain Green, who had killed a Lieutenant Massie in a duel. The angry avengers treated Green
liberally to wine. When he was suitably drunk, they chained him to a dungeon floor and bricked
over the opening, leaving him to a grotesque demise from starvation and cold in a blackened
tomb.
In the fictional version, Poe blends a festival motif with the intent of the monomaniac Montresor.
Montresor walls up Fortunato, a pompous adversary easily lured into a dank cellar on the pretext
of tasting a rare dry sherry stored there. The plot incorporates pre-spring festivities where the
costume of Arlecchino, the standard mime of the commedia dell'arte, is a common disguise. A
proud member of the mystic order of Masons, a fraternal order that originated in medieval trade
unions, Fortunato sheds his connection with the arcane secret society to wear carnival motley.
The author elevates Fortunato's vulnerability through the irony of his name, his oblivious mental
state, and the lightheartedness of his clownish dress. Proceeding down winding stairs in
catacombs redolent with mold and rimed with nitre, the two characters pass through ranks of
wine casks interlaid with heaps of human bones. They sample wine along the way and arrive at
an inner niche the size of an upright coffin. Poe uses the descent as a mood-altering device as the
gothic atmosphere gradually supplants the street-level celebration.
The carefully controlled action allows the narrator gradually to immure his victim with deft
strokes of a trowel. Like a corpse laid to rest in a crypt, Fortunato disappears from view until
only the bells of his conical jester's cap echo in the recess. Unrepentant, the killer takes literally
the family motto Nemo me impune lacessit, Latin for "No one provokes me with impunity."
Montresor chuckles like a madman before plastering over his handiwork with the standard
graveyard platitude In pace requiescat ["May he rest in peace"].
Further Information
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Cask of Amontillado," in The Complete Stories. New York: Knopf,
1992.
Symons, Julian. The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. New York:
Harper & Row, 1978.
Citation Information
Text Citation: Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. "'The Cask of Amontillado'." Encyclopedia of Gothic
Literature. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2005. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On
File, Inc.
http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=&iPin=EGL058&SingleRecord=
True (accessed March 9, 2008).