Sunday, November 13, 2011

At the end of the story, how is narrator's sick feeling accounted for?"The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of
Amontillado," Gothic conventions serve to create an atmosphere of terror; however, in
Poe's story, it is not preternatural beings that the characters must fear.  Instead, the
real horror resides in the hearts of human beings themselves.  At the end of Poe's
gothic tale of revenge served in the niter-filled catacombs of the Montesor family,
after the completion of his walling in of his adversary Fortunato who has committed "a
thousand insults" against him, the narrator mentions that his "heart grew sick--on
account of the dampness of the catacombs."  This excuse of the dampness for the
narrator's "sickness" is a rationalization of the narrator.  For, the narrator's real
sense of terror emanates from his comprehension of the real horror that lies within him,
the horror of which human beings are capable.


As he has
walled in Fortunato whom he has duped into entering the dank and dark catacombs of his
family, Montesor contemplates the horrific act that he has committed against a fellow
human being in the name of revenge for "a thousand insults."  Perhaps he feels sick
because he has a tinge of conscience at the last moment as he forces the final stone
into position.  But, it is more likely that he, like his victim, is terrorized by his
act against nature in killing the hapless victim, Fortunato.  Like Kurtz of
Heart of Darkness, Montesor, too, could utter the words, "Oh, the
horror!  the horror!" 

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