The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allen Poe
Crazy Montressor
• Acts friendly toward Fortunato, continues to
“smile in his face” (174). Cold and calculating
killer.
• Lures Fortunato into his cellar by appealing to
F’s pride and arrogance (“some fools will have it
that [Luchesi’s] taste is a match for your own”)
(175).
• Constantly “cares” for F’s heatlh, telling him to
be careful of the niter. Monty wants him to be
safe so he can kill him later!!!
– By telling us he wants Fortunato safe, it proves he is
an unreliable narrator!
The Montressors’ Motto
• Coats of arms are symbolic designs
originally used to decorate shields.
• This family’s coat of arms is a foot
crushing a serpent who is biting the heel…
• The motto is one of revenge: “Nobody
attacks me without punishment” (177).
Imagine this kid’s parents!!!
The trowel
• A pun is a play on words. We readers
discover that Fortunato is a Freemason (a
member of a secret society), but Monty
busts out a trowel and jokes that he’s a
mason too.
• You know how it ends, so clearly this is
foreshadowing to the fact that Monty will
wall Forty up later!
So what exactly went down?
• Monty led Forty into a sort of closet in the
catacombs, a deep hole in the wall that went
nowhere.
• Fortunato goes in, drunkenly expecting the
Amontillado, and Montressor quickly locks him to
the wall with a pre-set chain.
• He then walls the space up, and does three creepy
things:
– Sits on a pile of bones and listens to Forty struggle
– Thrust his sword into the cell to “quiet” Forty down
– Echoes Forty’s screams with screams of his own, a la
“Silence of the Lambs”
• Finally, after some taunting, Montressor
drops a torch into the cell, which will give
Fortunato some light as he dies, and
which will also burn up oxygen in the
tightly sealed cell.
• His heart grows sick, he claims on account
of the catacombs. Could that be true?
Could it be actual remorse? Could it be
that he cannot torture Fortunato any
longer? Yeah, that sounds about right to
me, too.
In case you didn’t see…
• On page 178, a brief passage in a NY
newspaper explains that on July 12, 1845,
a man’s description of his trip to Italy.
• That guy found, in a niche inside a church
wall, an upright human skeleton,
apparently trapped in the cell.
• A year later, Poe published “The Cask of
Amontillado.” Icky, man, icky.