Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"

Anyone familiar with Poe’s works knows to expect some pretty dark characters and situations in “The Cask of Amontillado.” From the get go, the narrator Montresor is out for revenge against his enemy, ironically named Fortunato. As the story moves along, it starts to become evident that the storyteller is not to be trusted.

In order to “not only punish [Fortunato] but punish [him] with impunity,” Montresor lures him into his wine cellar, which eerily doubles as a crypt for his perished ancestors and the soon to be dead Fortunato, on the night of a festival when loud music would envelope any screams and the townspeople would be drunk to even notice. Montresor enticed the man, “who prided himself upon the connoisseurship in wine,” to inspect a rare drink, Amontillado. The poor fool could not help himself.

By the end Poe makes it blatantly obvious that the narrator is insane: he chains his victim to a granite wall and seals building stones with mortar around him, enclosing him in a dark, damp hell until he slowly runs out of breathable air and dies. The reader never even knows what led Montresor to such an unusually cruel act; as far as anyone can tell, the worst act Fortunato committed was that he approached the narrator “with excessive warmth” because he was drunk. Fortunato died dressed the part for his end, the little bells of his jester hat jingling when his head dropped lifeless to his chest as if they were tolls from the church’s tower at his funeral.