The Title

'The Cask of Amontillado' - You might be thinking, 'Great. I don't even understand the title -
how am I supposed to understand this story?' So before we can start exploring Edgar Allan
Poe's famous short story, we first need to define a couple of words in his title. Amontillado is
a very specific kind of Spanish sherry, sherry being a fortified wine. And a cask is a barrel. So
if we put that all together, this story could be called 'The Barrel of Sherry,' but 'The Cask of
Amontillado' has a much better ring, don't you think?

Characters
So, aside from being a story about a barrel of wine, Poe's short story is one
of revenge and secret murder. It's a tale of terror starring two main
characters: Montresor and Fortunato. Montresor is the narrator and the murderer. Fortunato
is a wine connoisseur and the victim.

Plot

Poe achieves the unity of effect in The Cask of Amontillado

The story begins with the narrator Montresor explaining that a man called Fortunato has
wronged him a thousand times over, but his insult is the final blow that has provoked his vow
to revenge. He continues to assure us that he has given Fortunato no insight to the fact that
he is plotting to kill him, and he plans to use Fortunato's knowledge of wine to lure him to his
death.
Montresor continues to narrate his encounter with Fortunato at a carnival. He explains that
Fortunato is dressed as a jester, in a striped outfit and a jester hat with bells. Fortunato is also
very drunk, and he greets Montresor 'with great warmth.'
Very quickly, Montresor entices Fortunato to come to his home to see the pipe of
Amontillado that he has acquired. A pipe is just a word for a barrel. Keep in mind; this is
quite a large amount of Amontillado.
Montresor tells us that his servants are away from the house for the night, so they have the
house to themselves. Montresor's home is large, and according to the details, we can
assume it's been in the family for quite some time. When they arrive, they go into the
catacombs via a winding staircase. Catacombs are underground passages that are often
places where the dead are buried. In this case, these are the catacombs of the Montresors.
Remember, Fortunato is very drunk, and he begins coughing. Montresor says he is
concerned for the man's health and offers him more drink. At this point, Fortunato is getting
a bit goofy, jingling with all of his movements, and accuses Montresor of not being a mason.
Montresor says he most certainly is a mason and shows him a trowel, which is like a small,
somewhat-flattened shovel.
When they reach the most remote area of the catacombs, they find a smaller crypt that is
lined with human bones. From there, they see a recessed area, about four feet deep, three
feet wide, and seven feet high. Fortunato continues into this crypt with Montresor's urging
him into the smaller space. Poor Fortunato is so drunk that he is confused as Montresor
chains him to the area. Fortunato is still asking for the Amontillado while Montresor brings in
stone and mortar. However, once Montresor starts building a wall at the entrance of the
small area, Fortunato sobers up quickly. Montresor describes the sounds he hears as he
builds, the jingling of Fortunato's bells and the clanking of the chains.
Once the wall is about half-way up, Fortunato begins screaming, and Montresor mocks him.
Fortunato calms, and says, 'A very good joke indeed,' probably with his last bit of hope.
Montresor humors him for a moment, but soon Fortunato realizes it's not a game. He
screams, 'For the love of God, Montresor,' and Montresor repeats his words. There is silence.
Montresor, who wants Fortunato to continue to beg, becomes impatient and calls out to
Fortunato, trying to provoke him. The man does not respond. In hopes of getting Fortunato
to respond in some way, Montresor throws a torch into the only open area left. He hears the
tinkling of bells. He says his 'heart grew sick' but only on the 'account of the dampness of the
catacombs,' and he finishes building the wall. Then he says the events happened fifty years
prior. He concludes his reminiscence with 'rest in peace.'

Analysis: Plot
So, nothing like a story about burying someone alive, right? This particular short story is
known as Poe's perfect piece, with each piece of information, each step of the plot, being
intentionally prepared and executed (no pun intended). Poe called this the unity of effect.
Everything is relevant, especially each part of the plot.

The Plot Diagram

The diagram depicts the vital elements of plot

You might be familiar with the classic elements of plot and the plot diagram. Poe follows this
concept intentionally, making each step of the story important to the next.
The exposition is the introduction to the story. Usually, this is where we learn about
characters and setting. Poe sets the story as Montresor's memory. We discover the main
characters and, more importantly, that Montresor has vowed to seek revenge for
Fortunato's insult.
The conflict is what makes the story a story. It's the problem that must be solved. Montresor
wants to seek revenge, but he's not quite sure how. His problem? He wants to seek revenge
once and for all! He has a plan that begins as soon as he encounters Fortunato at the
carnival.
The rising action is the detail in the story that leads us further into the characters and lets us
explore the conflict. As Montresor and Fortunato descend into the catacombs, each step is
bringing Fortunato closer to his death (of course, he doesn't know that).
The climax is the highest point of interest in the story. It's the point when the main conflict
can be solved or not solved. Montresor is successful in chaining Fortunato to the wall. At this
point, there is no escape
The falling action is usually any after-effect of the climax. As Montresor bricks up the
wall, we know it’s over for Fortunato,no matter how much noise he makes

Finally, the Resolution is the conclusion of the story. All of the problems are solved; all
loose ends are tied. We learn Montresor is old, the events he described happened fifty
years before. We know he was successful

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 Fortunato’s 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 Montresor’s 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 Montresor’s family coat of
arms and motto. Montresor responds that his family shield portrays “a huge human foot
d’or, 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 enemy’s
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 Fortunato’s 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 Poe’s tales, resides in the lack of
evidence that accompanies Montresor’s claims to Fortunato’s “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 Montresor’s—or Poe’s—radar screen, and
the enduring horror of the story is the fact of punishment without proof. Montresor uses
his subjective experience of Fortunato’s 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. Montresor’s 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
interpretation—the fact that different people interpret the same things differently—to its
horrific endpoint.

Poe’s use of color imagery is central to his questioning of Montresor’s 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 Montresor’s masked motives.
The color schemes here represent the irony of Fortunato’s 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 Montresor’s family that line the vaults foreshadow the
story’s descent into the underworld. The two men’s 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.

1. “For the love of God, Montresor!”

In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Fortunato addresses this plea—his last spoken words—to
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 Fortunato’s
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.

Montresor’s 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
Fortunato’s cap bells in response. The sense of panic shifts here from Fortunato to
Montresor. Montresor’s 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.
Edgar Allan Poe
On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe’s father
and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and
John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a
prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the
University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of
school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s
gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he
moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems,
Tamerlane, and Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a second
collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received
significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to
the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of
financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her
daughter Virginia in Baltimore, Maryland.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he
became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved
with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was fourteen years
old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals
including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia
and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he
established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of
his best-known stories and poems, including “The Fall of the House of Usher," “The Tell-
Tale Heart," “The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and “The Raven.” After Virginia’s death
from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe’s lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism
worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in
Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he
was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of “acute
congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case
has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s work as an editor, a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on American and
international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and
detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short
story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and
structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s
sake” movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a
literary precursor. Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French.
Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major
figure in world literature.

Selected Bibliography
Poetry

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)

Poems (1831)

The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Fiction

Berenice (1835)

Ligeia (1838)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

The Black Cat (1843)

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

The Purloined Letter (1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

The Oval Portrait (1850)

The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)