Poe: The Cask of Amontillado

Admittedly when one is asked to think of a murder scene Hollywood always comes to mind. Whether we think of the torture scene in “Reservoir Dogs”, where Mr. Blonde dances around a petrified cop, cracking a joke here, slicing pieces of flesh there, or we think of the legendary shower scene in “Psycho” where Marion is slain by the mother of Norman Bates, we always seem to turn to Hollywood to find the crudest moments of suspense and most vividly feelings of anxiety and fear. Short stories, however, rarely come to our mind. Their designation as concise forms of literary art typically withholds their association to a successful depiction of suspense or creation of fear. Yet “The Cask of Amontillado”, by poet and writer Edgar Allan Poe, is a short story that manages to prove otherwise. Through the unreliability of Montresor, as both character and narrator, “The Cask of Amontillado” achieves to create and maintain a feeling of suspense and fear throughout the story, which manages to tie us to the text and to aesthetically force us to respond to the events taking place.

As a character in the story, Montresor is highly unreliable. The plot tells us that he tricks Fortunato, a fellow nobleman, into going to his palazzo just so that he could take revenge and kill him. In this sense, not only is Montresor an unreliable character because he intends and successfully manages to trick Fortunato into accompanying him, but he is also an unreliable narrator, for his omission of the reasons for his revenge when telling the story appears to be highly convenient for his character. In addition the inclusion of so much detail in the story serves as a clear indicator of his unreliability. Not only does Montresor remembers and describes every action taking place, but also every conversation held between him and Fortunato. At the end of the story Montresor admits that he committed the crime half a century ago. Yet his description of every action and conversation is so detailed that it seems as though he were experiencing them at the moment. The fact that the real actions and conversations took place presumably half a century ago makes us wonder how is the character able to recollect them so precisely. We are posed with a dilemma: either the actions and conversations never took place and Montresor is inventing them or they did take place and Montresor is offering a consistent, yet inexact, representation of them. The story itself leaves us with no solid answer for this dilemma. For all we know, Montresor could be an assassin describing its most memorable murder or he could be a simple delusional individual describing a crime that never took place.

The unreliability of Montresor as a character and narrator becomes important when we think of the way suspense is created and maintained throughout the story. In a sense it is the plot what creates it. Montresor as a character guides us through the process of meeting Fortunato and walking with him through the catacombs. The plot itself is enough to stimulate a feeling of suspense, since we never know at what moment he will take the trowel and kill Fortunato. It is Montresor as a narrator, however, what maintains it throughout the story. Not only is it that Montresor gives us information that Fortunato ignores, namely that he intends to kill him, but also that he gives us plenty of details for us to reenact the events in our mind and be able to feel them with greater intensity. Finally it is the unreliability of the narration itself what secures the suspense even when we are done reading the narrative, for we never know whether Montresor is an assassin or a delusional individual. In a sense it is arguable that this kind of ending creates a creepier setting in our mind than the one in the story, for it allows us to associate Montresor to what we fear the most and unconsciously want to interpret from the story.

Resources

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