R. Whatley JGIP - Volume 5, Issue 7 (2012), pp. 56-59
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Rehana Whatley
Oakwood University, USA
Keywords: Friend, Deceit, Good, Evil, Benediction.
M id carnival season of pre-lenten days when drinking, merriment, and gaiety are out of control, anything can happen. The time is perfect for Montresor’s plan to punish his friend,
Fortunato, “Rich by chance” (52), an upstart, who brags, boasts, flaunts, and bullies
Montresor in ignorance and arrogance. In his study of cultural and historical backgrounds of Poe’s stories, Richard P. Benton argues that it is definitely a conflict that reflects social tensions between a
“proud but relatively impoverished aristocrat” and the newly rich Fortunato” (20).
Poe’s criticism fails to emphasize that Fortunato and Montresor are friends. Fortunato follows Montresor trustingly into the vaults. This piece of information opens the way for Montresor’s very enigmatic, careless, and carefree comment: “may he rest in peace,” directed towards Fortunato. Montresor and
Fortunato are poles apart. While the latter cares less and flaunts who he is, an expert on Amontillado wines; the former is an introvert, hiding his feelings and desires from the outside world. Montresor seethes with hate to destroy Fortunato, the source of his pain, and misery.
Fortunato’s carnival identity, a motley clown is a brilliant stroke of luck. Montresor plans and executes a macabre plot, a deadly joke by leading Fortunato to think that he is going into the vault to test
Amontillado. Under the cover of costumes, masks, capes, and disguises, Montresor kills his friend in cold blood. Even when Fortunato’s drinking wears off, he chokingly laughs at Montresor’s devious prank. While Montresor is dead serious, Fortunato believes it is a joke, because remember, one, they are friends; two, Fortunato is inebriated.
Critics such as Charles May point out that there is no remorse in Montresor’s heart when he finally confesses after fifty years (81). We need to remember that Montresor believes he is out to get justice by baiting Fortunato. By enticing him into his web, Montresor not only perpetrates a killing, but owns it, justifies it by keeping the body of Fortunato under his palace. D.H. Hirsch agreeing with Moldenhauer says, “it would be . . . appropriate to say that Poe deliberately creates bizarre human situations in his fiction for the purpose of pushing the serious reader into new moral territory” (15). In a memorable, simple, down-to-earth moment, Fortunato fettered in the crypt to die, realizes an epiphany and cries,
“For the love of God, Montresor!” (224). Fortunato wants to get back, meet up with his wife and to go about his business. That is the last that Montresor hears from Fortunato. In spite of Montresor’s
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R. Whatley JGIP - Volume 5, Issue 7 (2012), pp. 56-59 repeated callings, there is silence. Dumfounded and resigned, Fortunato is choking to death because of the dampness of the crypt and the lack of air. To complete his ruthless plan, Montresor tosses into the niche almost bricked up, his torch and places the last stone in its position.
While Fortunato wanted to be released from an excruciatingly painful joke, Montresor, his friend, is paining to hear Fortunato beg for his life or apologize for the insult. A meaning emerges with
Fortunato’s cry. Like Kurtz in “The Heart of Darkness” whose “horror, the horror” emphasizes his rooted pain, similarly Fortunato’s primal plunge within reveals the deepest pain of his heart. Instead of morality in the conventional sense, Poe is opening up a newer horizon of deep pain.
Misery in both Fortunato’s and Montresor’s cases is the core of Poe’s brave new world in “The Cask of
Amontillado.” Montresor keeps the memory of Fortunato’s decimation in his heart, which in plain words has been fanged with hate and anger but also with thoughts about human links. For fifty years,
Montresor has lived with the story of catacombs and when the framework confession happens, the confession within, “rest in peace” transcends and spreads outwardly. One of the greatest mystics of the twentieth century (Whispers from the Brighter World), tells us, “knowing thyself well is not easy; until the end of his lifetime, man remains an enigma to himself and others around him. He cannot grasp his true nature [concealed in the being] until it surfaces.”
Montresor’s confession divests him of all knowledge pertaining to the murder, before his death. For the first time, Montresor is unburdened of doubt. Notice how Montresor doesn’t hide anything from his confessor. He relishes giving the minutest detail. Baraban comments that the final pardoning of
Fortunato occurs because of Montresor’s conviction that he has “avenged himself” (57).
Instead of Montresor it is as if Fortunato’s all-consuming ego is hurling him into the darkest abyss. To make the revenge sinister, Montresor, like the grim reaper wears a mask and a black cape. Like
Conrad’s Kurtz who cannot turn his back on darkness, Fortunato is impatiently treading deeper and deeper unwittingly to his annihilation. Unable to elicit a “forgive me” or “I am sorry” response from
Fortunato, Montresor throws his torch into the crypt. Montresor’s fiery anger hears a few jingles as
Fortunato, his friend, burns into oblivion.
In Montresor’s confession to the priest, his honesty interlaces with darkness. He “vomits” the book of his life. His final words: “In pace requiescat!” (24), reveals a different aspect of Montresor. Like an onion divested of its covers, Montresor, having freed himself of painful knowledge, darkness, feels dizzy or lighthearted. He turns around and playfully gives Fortunato his last rites. The confession within the framework confession is a peephole into Montresor’s heart. Having carried Fortunato in his mind and heart, Montresor feels free at last. When Montresor confesses after fifty years on his deathbed, remorse is not paramount. We must remember that Poe is not interested in conventional morality. Like Fortunato who pleads to be freed in his loneliest moment, so also Montresor in his last moment extends an act of simple impulse. He remembers Fortunato and says a restful goodbye to him. In the light of the intuitive confession within his confession, this paper maintains that Montresor wishes to spread to Fortunato peace in a congenial manner, releasing the goodwill that was growing in his heart around the epicenter of pain.
I disagree with Richard M. Fletcher who maintains that Montresor’s actions reveal a mad man. Stephen
Peithman agrees with him saying, “consider how he echoes Fortunato scream for scream” (174). This paper asserts that Montresor’s mind is crystal clear as he leads his friend calculatedly to his catacombs.
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Confession within a Confession: Poe’s Brave New World in “The Cask of Amontillado”
The pre-lenten carnival helps him to gather his evil rationale into a plan to entice Fortunato to his death for injuries and an insult. If Montresor is one of the dying aristocracy as some critics have proven, then he carries untold grudges against nouvaux riches like Fortunato. Benton, as mentioned earlier, argues that the conflict rages between an impoverished aristocrat and the upstart Fortunato (19), to which this paper adds that we cannot forget that they know each other, they are friends.
Carrying a trowel under his cloak, Montresor has Fortunato’s burial on his mind. His single focus makes him lead his willing victim into his family’s catacombs. Three sides of the crypt are mounted with familial bones. From the fourth wall bones have been thrown down. Perhaps Montresor glued to his revenge plan has already prepared the standing casket or coffin for his friend Fortunato. Unlike Iago who shuts his mouth and will not utter a word, Montresor on his deathbed, thinks of Fortunato, and from the ashes of his heart arises a benediction. Lying in Montresor’s family vault, Fortunato is a part of the aristocratic family! Montresor hated Fortunato, now Fortunato is part of him, and his “extensive familial catacombs!”
(222).
Montresor is brutally honest in his confession and very sane. He has lived fifty years with Fortunato underneath him. Fortunato, like the pinned down serpent on Montresor’s coat of arms, delivers the last shot, perhaps the best in the common sense expression: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Montresor’s deathbed confession blesses Fortunato, revealing that some good comes out of the pain of evil and life can be a win/win situation.
The ending of the story is textured, layered. Delivering his confession to the priest, Montresor assumes indirectly the role of Fortunato’s confessor. Half a century ago Montresor made his friend disappear without a trace. Just as he actively suffocated him, immured him, he releases him. By releasing
Fortunato, he releases himself from himself. Judge, executioner, and priest Montresor is too sane and wily to be considered mad. Montresor does not have remorse, but he has transcended momentarily the cryptic depths of his ego. Fortunato assaulted Montresor’s ego, and Montresor uses his friend
Fortunato’s egotistical tendencies to perpetuate his revenge on the “motley fool.” Montresor’s life must have been totally reclusive as is evident from his deathbed confession. The confession within lays bare a man with a care. Having avenged himself, Montresor, as Baraban maintains, does something he could never have done in the past. His final words reveal he has faced his hatred of another human and discovered a care. “The answer resides in each one, . . . The human being finds inside himself in some dramatic circumstances a power he did not know before” (Whispers from the Brighter World).
Montresor’s silence of years demands superhuman strength to keep everything secret. At the end of
Eureka, Poe says, “not only is every man his own god, every man is god” (22). Poe is unperturbed by societal notions of morality and religion. Using the horror route, he is opening up a brave new world.
Montresor’s deviousness and exultation during the process of Fortunato’s annihilation bespeaks of a
Frankenstein who thinks he is his own god and can do anything. Under the cover of carnival season,
Montresor turns Fortunato’s crypt into a crematorium. No doubt, Poe is experimenting with prevalent ideologies of his day. Nothing is sacred in the usual sense. In Poe the world is turned inside out to enter uncharted primal pain basic to all humans. For a proposed second edition to Eureka, Poe wrote, “That
God may be all in all, each must become God” (23). Man-as-god Montresor stores his killer memories for half a century. D.H. Hirsch concludes “this one time in his life he (Montresor) acts much like a superman, arrogating to himself the powers of a god. He does so precisely by devaluing a human life, snuffing it out without a trace” (40). I agree with Hirsch and believe that just because Poe’s characters do not feel guilt doesn’t mean that we should deny Poe the credit of raising moral issues in fiction.
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R. Whatley JGIP - Volume 5, Issue 7 (2012), pp. 56-59
Critics such as Thomas Pribeck and David Reynolds argue about the religious symbolism of Fortunato as Christ being led to Golgotha, etc., this enquiry maintains, on the other hand, that it is the humanistic echoes that reverberate in Montresor’s being. In his preface to the story in Collected Works, T.O.
Mabbot writes, “‘The Cask’ on its surface completely amoral, is perhaps the most moral of his tales”
(111). The murderer remembers that his victim, his friend, rests. Pain, physical, emotional, and spiritual can squeeze out a brave new hope, as we see in Poe’s “The Cask,” a brave new world teetering out of darkness and violence.
Babuji, Shri Ramchandra of Shahjehanpur. Whispers from the Brighter World. Printed in India at
Sudarsan Graphics, No. 27, Neelakanda Street, T. Nagar, Chennai 600 017.
Baraban, Elena V. “The Motive for Murder in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ by Edgar Allan Poe.” Fall 2004,
Rocky Mountain Review.
Benton, Richard P. “’Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’: Its Cultural and Historical Backgrounds.” Poe
Studies 29.1 (June 1996): 19-27.
Fletcher, Richard M. The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe. The Hague: Mouton, 1973.
Hirsch, D.H. Lectures: “Poe as Moralist.” Seventy-third Annual Commemoration Program of the Poe
Society, October, 1995.
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Harvard University Press, 1978, pp. 111 and 1252.
May, Charles. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Moldenhauer, Joseph P. “Murder as a Fine Art: Basic Connections between Poe’s Aesthetics,
Psychology, and Moral Vision.” PMLA (1968).
Peithman, Stephen. “The Cask of Amontillado.” The annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Steven
Peithman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1981. 168-174.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Cask of Amontillado.” Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Ed. Laurie G.
Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell, 7 th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2010. 219-224.
Eureka. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: The Library of America, 1984.
Pribeck, Thomas. “The Serpent and the Heel.” Poe Studies 20.1 (June 1987): 22-23.
Reynolds, David S. “Poe’s Art of Transformation: ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ in its Cultural Context.” New
Essays on Poe’s Major Tales. Ed. Kenneth Silverman. New York, Cambridge University Press,
1993. 93-113.
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