Essays on The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe, the celebrated American writer, critic and editor, holds a prominent place among the literary circle. He is famous for his excellent short stories and poems, surrounded by an aura of anonymity and obscurity. He can rightly be termed as a Romantic who is often recognized as the forerunner of the detective fiction and science fiction. His personal life endured many ups and downs. The tremors of love and feelings find persuasive expression in most of his works. The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell- Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death are some ...

“The Cask of Amontillado” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1846. The story deals with revenge, torture and murder and it is set in a catacomb where skeletons might be seen like in underground Paris. The story is also about Montresor’s murderous mind and the actions which let him plot his revenge. Montresor is the narrator of the story as well as the protagonist and the murderer. He is a cold and merciless person who believes in murder as a necessary way to defend his honor. Fortunato mocks him numerous times and Montresor ...

Violence and Revenge

Violence and revenge only hurt people. Human beings are known for their innate desire for revenge, which makes vengeance part of our survival mechanics. However, those with mental illness pose more danger of harming others since they are driven by their subconscious mind to revenge against physical and verbal abuse and could use weird forms in the process. Revenge is often cruel, lustful and insatiable to the extent that a provoked mentally ill person would do anything to ensure they make others pay for physical or verbal abuse. Such acts of violence and revenge pose major problems in the ...

The story, The Cask of Amontillado, is surely one of the finest works of literature even penned by a creative artist. This literary work by the stalwart author, Edgar Allan Poe, goes on to engage the avid readers and stirs them to the very core with the portrayal of sheer horror that marks the end of the story. This story is about the theme of revenge and shows the male protagonist who is also the narrator of the story trap another character named Fortunato. ““The Cask of Amontillado” remains one of Poe’s most popular short stories and a ...

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic, and a representative of the literary movement called Romanticism. He became popular thanks to his dark and grim short stories. Poe is considered to be the founder of the detective-fiction genre and psychological prose in literature. He is immediately recognized by his famous poem “The Raven.” But the writer proved his ability to create dread and fear not only in poetic lines, but also in prose. The short story “The Cask of Amontillado” that takes an honored place in Poe’s gallery of nightmares and horror accurately ...

The Cask of Amontillado was one of famous American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. It involves the story of the narrator named Montresor and his arch enemy, at least based on his perceptions, named Fortunato. In the beginning of the story, Montresor was wailing about how he has been irreparably insulted by his acquaintance—referring to Fortunato. An almost clear picture of what type of character Montresor has can be obtained as early as the first few paragraphs of the short story. The main and sub-conflicts in the story were mainly the result of Montresor’s hunger ...

Edgar Allan Poe and the Concept of Death

One of the most puzzling detective writers, Edgar Allan Poe still remains to be a mystery for both experts in literature and common readers. In his stories E. Poe attempted to draw the image of death, an incredible and at the same time an inevitable enemy of the human race. Death is all-powerful as well as the feeling of fear or even horror of a human in the face of death. It is not accidentally that the author places his characters in a space isolated from the world – it can be a torture chamber, well, jail, old estate – where ...

There is never an opportune moment for death. Death occurs when people least expect it. Edgar Allen Poe in his “The Cask of Amontillado” and Kate Chopin in her “The Story of an Hour” talk about how death comes at inopportune moments - when it is least expected. Death is the central theme in both of these works, with the protagonists wishing for someone else’s death. The results however are completely different. Even though the protagonists wish for the other person to die, they really do not have a strong reason for them to die. Montresor talks of ...

Edgar Allan Poe is one of America’s most famous writers, arguably the prince of horror stories. His oeuvre covers a wide range of work, from poetry to prose, the Arab world to 19th century America, and detective fiction to horror stories. His 1845 poem, The Raven, made him a sensation and is regarded as one of the genre-defining works of American literature. His life and career were deeply troubled, but his legacy has enshrined him along with the greats. Poe’s stories are stylistically unique – displaying a huge diversity of elements taken from all over English and world ...

Edgar Alan Poe became a prominent and famous American writer due to his grim and dark short stories and poems. All his works are shrouded in atmosphere of fear and horror that is created with the help of different types of imagery. The short story The Cask of Amontillado is not an exception and pulls the reader in the fearful ambience by means of visual and auditory imagery. Edgar Poe uses imagery in order to convey the feeling of terror, fright, inevitable and slowly approaching death. Richard Painting in his paper Relationships Between Poe’s Imagery and his View ...

Horror through Imagination: How do Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson create suspense in their stories “Harvey’s Dream,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Lottery”

Introduction

Suspense is a literary style that is adopted by most authors to invoke the creative minds of the audience. Therefore, the authors intentionally fail to draw a conclusion to an event in a story, but instead live it upon the audience to think. On the other hand, mystery is an occurrence that is beyond human understanding, and in most cases it is associated with murder. This essay is anchored on these ...

Monteresor in the main hero and narrator of the story “The cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. He is the murderer who confesses of his own crime fifty years after it happened. The motif of his narration can be treated ambiguously. On the one side, it looks like he is just bragging about the fact that he has managed to escape the responsibility and stay away from the police for so many years. On the other side, a reader can assume that this story is a kind of confession of the person who had lived all his live ...

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic, a representative of the literary movement called Romanticism. He became popular thanks to his dark and grim short stories. Poe is considered to be the founder of the detective-fiction genre and psychological prose in literature. He is immediately recognized by his famous poem The Raven. But the writer proved his ability to create dread and fear not only in poetic lines, but also in prose. So, the short story The Cask of Amontillado also takes an honored place in Poe’s gallery of nightmares and horror. In ...

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Cask of Amontillado, is a confession of a murder that occurred 50 years prior, whereby the narrator was never caught or tried despite his wrongdoing. It tells of one man’s hatred against an unsuspecting individual, whom the narrator has been plotting to kill because of alleged insults the individual made towards him (Baraban 47). All throughout the story, it was never revealed what these remarks were, but which apparently wounded the narrator’s ego so much that he wanted to exact vengeance on the person. Betrayal is also a central theme in the story ...

English

Edgar Allen Poe can best be described as a writer who was seriously influenced by neo-Gothic interests. A great American writer, Poe was attracted and influenced by the neo-Gothic writers much before his time because of which, most of his work is on horror. Poe was also witness to a period of uncertainty in society as deceit, murder for gain, revenge and arson was quite common. While courts played an important role in trying to curb this menace, cases were manipulated to benefit the guilty. This had a profound impact on Poe who used certain themes of court matters to develop his ...

One of the main characteristics of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are an artistic disclosure and analysis of the human psyche and the research of how human psychology determines people’s actions. The author considered the human personality not in the aspects of its morality, neither of its philosophical views, nor of the activity of political consciousness, but in the most difficult aspect – psychology. The prose heritage of Poe is mostly represented by his “scary” short stories, which include such tales as “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “The Oval Portrait”, “Ligeia”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, ...

The majority of the narrator’s in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories have at least a little bit wrong with them. Even in “Pit and the Pendulum,” while the narrator appears to be an innocent victim of the Spanish Inquisition, his time below ground has certainly pushed his perspective toward the breaking point. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator is convinced that he is not insane, and he is bent on convincing the reader that he is not insane. However, the fact that he waits until his murder victim’s eyes are open at night (and that the correct eye ...

Edgar Allan Poe is a writer who dies in the gutter but left behind a rich legacy. He was born poor and he dies poor, but he filled the years of his life with literary richness. “Edgar Allan Poe has always been a paradox in American literary history. Although he is probably the most widely read of all American writers, he is commonly believed to have been no more than an alcoholic,” ( May, p ix, 1991). He had thousand of readers when he lived, but no friends. Poe was a writer who added value to English literature during his times by introducing mystery, suspense ...

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most mysterious and remarkable writers of the 19th century, whose artistic heritage has always been readers’ and critics’ concern. Being a representative of the American Romanticism, Poe is also well known as an innovator of new genres of literature (detective-fiction and science fiction genres) and as successful practitioner of the short story. His literature style is considered to be macabre and anxious, and the theme of a death is presented in the most of his short stories, and every time it is inextricably linked with psychological conditions of the heroes. “The Masque of the ...

“The Cask of Amontillado” is a story of revenge told in the first-person point of view. Montresor, the killer, narrates in detail the crime he committed fifty years ago against Fortunato for “insulting” him. It was apparent that Fortunato invested a great amount of time in plotting his revenge, but it was unclear why after fifty years, he was finally telling the story that no one ever found out. This is the first hint to the complexities of the character of Montresor which, as the story progresses, contradicted then interestingly intertwined with that of Fortunato’s that in the end it ...

There is a thin line between personal freedom of choice and the moral inclination of an individual. The choice chosen draws guidance from one’s own personal beliefs and morals. As such, there is conflict at times between what one is free to do and what their morals enable them to do. At times, whatever is to be done is legal and one is free to do them but their own morals come into conflict and stop them from the undertaking. As such, this paper will clearly discuss the concepts of freedom of options versus personal morals. An analysis of ...

“Instructor’s name’

‘Subject’ “The Birth-Mark” and “The Cask of Amontillado” – A comparative study Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two important contributors of the nineteenth-century American literature. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most celebrated authors, posthumously though, of the past century. Some of his stories are almost autobiographical, and though he lived in a previous era, his ideas were far ahead of his time. Nathaniel Hawthorne is an author, whose works are even today cited for seeking ethical guidance. His stories urge the reader to analyze his moral confusions. This essay is an attempt to compare and ...

Analysis of Poe’s Short Stories

Reading Edgar Allan Poe’s short story - “The Cask of Amontillado”, “The Tell- Tale Heart” and “The Oval Portrait” – is indeed very gripping and thrilling. With every sentence that one reads more interest and curiosity builds up to know what will happen next in the story. Each of these stories is about horror, death and killing, with a great element of suspense. The Gothic element therefore is very strong in all the three short stories. Joanne Harris (Edgar Allan Poe, p.42) stated in The Telegraph that Poe is a master of horror and one of his strongholds is the detailed ...

“The Cask of the Amontillado,” is a short story presenting a death revenge castigated by Montresor the narrator to his unsuspecting friend Fortunato. Montresor fails to specify the reason that forces him to murder his friend in cold blood. He only affirms to the audience that Fortunato had irreparably affronted him. The narrator is successful in killing Fortunato; however, in the end it is obvious that the whole narration is recollection of his murder about fifty years ago. In the second story the “Night Drive,” by Rubem Fonseca an anonymous narrator presents the story in first person acclaiming his murder of ...

While the term madness has no standard definition, I understand it as a state of mind where a person is not in a position to make informed decisions. This essentially means that a mad person always or at most times portrays irrationality in their decisions. They lack reason and cannot be judged as being objectively right in their thinking. However, mad people do not see the insanity in them, for this reason, many philosophers, including the famous Rene Descartes, have argued that perhaps we, who think we are normal, are the mad ones, and those we perceive as being mad, are the normal ...

The Cask of Amontillado is a gripping story by Edgar Allan Poe which explores the realm of human emotions. The author pens the literary work and aptly exudes his expertise though the various devices which are used to enhance the tumultuous influence of the story on the minds of the readers. A close analysis of the characters and the theme along with the other literary devices will make one comprehend the excellence and the paramount influence of the story on the human minds. The author personifies his “hostile feelings and thoughts, symbolizing the repressed instincts of the personality” in the ...

In his short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar Allen Poe presents a narrator who entraps an enemy by appealing to the vices of his character. The narrator does not explain very much of why Fortunato is his enemy; he simply notes “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge” (p. 191). For most of the story, the reader does not know the name of the narrator, only the name of his enemy. However, it is clear from the first paragraph that the narrator seeks revenge, and ...

Journal Entry

Symbolism is a tool used to bring in the underlying story of the era in the fiction, such as Emily’s house and Montresso’s catacomb both are a symbol of Gothic literature. This creates a reality and passion in stories. In both the stories “The Cask Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, the writers present their ideas symbolically that contribute to the development of the themes.

The narrator describes Emily’s house as, “eye sore among eye sore” which symbolizes a deserted, scary house with over grown bushes, chipped off paint. This shows a complete symbol ...

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thorea was surely one of the finest writers to emanate from the United States before the Civil War. His novel Walden describes an almost perfect settlement where the subject lives simply in natural surroundings and is an ideal introduction to his seminal work. Another important work is his essay on Civil Disobedience which is perhaps one of the best known elements which argues for resistance to civil government which is a moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau’s books and articles number over 20 volumes and he has several contributions on natural history and philosophy where ...

27 February 2011

How does Edgar Allan Poe display the central characteristics of romanticism in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’

Edgar Allan Poe was an author best known for his dark tales of the macabre and utilised many significant elements of romanticism in his work. Known for its love of beauty, nature and emotion, romanticism is often thought of as being colourful and light but it did also have an interest in the sensation of fear and horror, especially when in association with the sublime and the wildest forms of nature. It does not, as many may believe, link directly to romance and love. Edgar Allan Poe uses an under-current of romanticism in a lot of his ...