The story is told in first person, so we dont explicitly learn the narrators name until near the end.

Until
then, well call him the narrator. Here we go.

The narrator begins by telling us that Fortunato has hurt him. Even worse, Fortunato has insulted him.
The narrator must get revenge. He meets Fortunato, who is all dressed up in jester clothes for a carnival
celebration and is already very drunk. The narrator mentions hes found a barrel of a rare brandy
called Amontillado. Fortunato expresses eager interest in verifying the wines authenticity.

So he and the narrator go to the underground graveyard, or catacomb, of the Montresor family.
Apparently, thats where the narrator keeps his wine. The narrator leads Fortunato deeper and deeper
into the catacomb, getting him drunker and drunker along the way. Fortunato keeps coughing, and the
narrator constantly suggests that Fortunato is too sick to be down among the damp crypts, and should
go back. Fortunato just keeps talking about the Amontillado.

Eventually, Fortunato walks into a man-sized hole thats part of the wall of a really nasty crypt. The
narrator chains Fortunato to the wall, then begins to close Fortunato in the hole by filling in the opening
with bricks. When he has one brick left, he psychologically tortures Fortunato until he begs for mercy
and we finally learn the narrators name: Fortunato calls him Montresor.

After Fortunato cries out Montresors name, he doesnt have any more lines. But just before Montresor
puts in the last brick, Fortunato jingles his bells. Then Montresor finishes the job and leaves him there to
die. At the very end, Montresor tells us that the whole affair happened fifty years ago, and nobody has
found out.

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

Everything takes on symbolic meaning in The Cask. Every detail seems to stand for something else, or
to be flashing an encoded, and no doubt gruesome, message that we are compelled to decipher. The
Montresor family coat of arms really stands out, though, for several reasons.

First lets break down the description. Picture a shield. On it is a picture of a giant gold human foot in
a field azure i.e., a blue field. The foot is crush[ing] a wild and crazy serpent. The serpents fangs
are buried in the foots heel. Seems obvious, right? Fortunato is a snake in the grass, he bit Montresor,
and Montresors big gold foot is coming crashing down on him as a result.

Theres that motto to go with it: Nemo me impune lacessit. A quick search of the Internet reveals that
this means no one attacks me with impunity and that its the motto of Scotland!

When we find this out, it becomes pretty obvious that the coat of arms is fabricated. Its Montresors
fantasy of what he wants to have happen, and yet another hint that Fortunato doesnt get. But all that
really tells us is what we already know: Montresor lies.
Whats really significant about the arms is the color azure. This is the only color explicitly mentioned
that isnt connected to death and darkness. It literally means sky blue and sky means freedom,
especially when we contrast it with the claustrophobic, prison-like atmosphere of the catacomb.

This also speaks to the theme Drugs and Alcohol. We know that Poe often used his fiction to explore
his addictions, one of which was the drug laudanum. Laudanum comes from poppies often blue ones.
The field azure on the arms could be a field of poppies. If so, it makes all that stuff about freedom
seem ironic. If it represents addiction, it represents imprisonment, thus highlighting the storys tension
between freedom and confinement.

An underground catacomb, somewhere in Italy, during the carnival season

The setting in The Cask, and in most Horror or Gothic Fiction, has a special purpose: to suggest
freedom or confinement, in harmony or opposition to the freedom or confinement of the characters.
This is called the Gothic Interior. Most people go back and forth between feeling free and feeling
trapped. The Gothic Interior is meant to make us hyperaware of these emotions through careful
attention to the setting.

When we look at the settings of The Cask, we can see that the story has a distinct movement from
freedom to confinement.

First, lets start with the country. Italy doesnt directly factor into this formula of the Gothic Interior, at
least not in an obvious way. It might have something to do with the guy who wrote the first explicitly
Gothic story, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. That guy is Horace Walpole, and when he first
published Otranto, he claimed that it was a translation of an old Italian manuscript he found. When the
story became a huge success, he confessed that he wrote it himself.

Not so coincidentally, Otranto has much to do with freedom and confinement. In a nutshell, its about a
giant gold helmet falling from the sky and trapping a guy underneath it. So, the Italian setting is probably
Poes nod to Walpole.

The carnival season and the Montresor family catacomb are a bit more direct. The carnival is a literal
celebration of freedom, which both Montresor and Fortunato are participating in at the beginning of the
story.

As they journey through the catacomb, Montresor and Fortunato move into smaller and smaller and
fouler and fouler spaces. This suggesting that, as they travel farther away from fresh air, they are also
moving further away from freedom.

Fortunato is eventually trapped in a space that represents the opposite of freedom: hes chained up and
bricked inside a man-sized crypt with no air and no way out. You can certainly argue that Montresor
presents a contrast to Fortunatos fate in that he finds freedom at the end of the story: he is alive.

Montresor is free to do as he wishes. Ironically, what he wishes to do is tell this story. Which means that
the story has him trapped. He cant forget it, and he has to talk about it. In his mind, hes still down
there in the hole with Fortunato.

POV

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

First Person (Central Narrator)

Montresor is our vile narrator. He is dedicated to his own point of view, which is cold, merciless, brutal,
conniving, and vengeful. He doesnt mind telling us about his torture and murder of Fortunato; indeed,
he thinks what he did was the just, right way to handle the situation.

Given his brutality and insensitivity, it might surprise you to learn that Montresors point of view also
involves poetry and writing. A quick look at Poes philosophy of fiction writing will help you see how we
come to this conclusion.

In addition to the idea of secret writing, which we discuss in Whats Up With the Title, Poe was very
concerned with the form his stories should take. He wanted each story to be a little puzzle, with all sorts
of hidden pieces we have to try to pick out ourselves. You can see this idea in the tight structure of The
Cask.

Poe also believed that lyric poetry, or poetry that is characterized by the expression of the poets
innermost feelings, thoughts, and imagination was the highest form of writing, and he wanted to bring
short story writing up to the level of lyric poetry.

When we take all that into account, Montresors confession/brag-fest begins to look suspiciously meta-
fictional. Meta-fiction means that a story or a moment in the story comments on the writing process in
some way. It tells us how the author feels about writing.

Because Montresor is the guy telling the story, he becomes symbolic of the writer and is likely to have
some of the writers habits and here we mean both the literal writer, in this case Poe, and, in the
larger sense, any person who is driven to express themselves by writing. This isnt necessarily true of all
first person narratives, but in Montresors case, its abundantly clear even if we dont know Poes
philosophy.

Look at the names. Montresor, and Fortunato. Do those sound like real people to you? Of course not,
because Montresor is making it all up and he wants us to know it. (See Symbols, Imagery, Allegory and
the Montresor Familys Character Analysis to find out why we think this.)
In addition to being phony, the names are rhythmic, song-like, and should remind us of Poe and poetry.
For-tu-na-to. Mon-tre-sor. These are names to be sung, said out loud, like poetry. Amontillado is the
only name not invented by Montresor, and it has that same quality A-mon- ti -lla do it almost seems
like a combination of Montresor and Fortunato. It rhymes with Fortunato, and it shares a mon, which
can mean both the possessive mine or mound or mountain. This might suggest positive feelings
about the craft of writing.

On the other hand, as we say in the beginning, Montresors point of view is also extremely hideous and
vile. Which suggests that maybe Poe had some mixed feelings about writing. His writer is a murderer.
From a meta-fictional perspective, Poe, through Montresor, might be asking if fictionalizing ones own
experience, or the experience of others, cheapens, or even destroys the experience. It suggests that he
fears that the very process of writing is somehow violent.

GENRE

You dont need us to tell you The Cask is Horror or Gothic the whole story is about two guys walking
through a vast underground graveyard, in the middle of the night, getting drunker and drunker. And
somebody is getting walled in a hole. That scares us.

But what scares us in Poe is what makes The Cask Literary Fiction as well. Poe doesnt show us the
violence in the story; there is no blood and no guts or gore its all in the psychology. The Cask
presents a bizarre psychological study of two creepy men.

Both men are on a quest. Fortunato wants the Amontillado, and Montresor wants Fortunato to feel his
revenge. And where there is revenge, there is usually tragedy meaning somebody dies in the end..

Creepy, Elegant, and Funny

Montresor describes the mounds of bones and stench of human remains so elegantly, it almost sounds
beautiful. The following passage is a good example:

We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a
deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux [torches pronounced flam-bow]
rather to glow than flame.

Read it out loud. Doesnt it sound pretty? See how it moves? See how flambeaux rhymes with glow?
Perhaps the beauty makes it scarier.

The creepily humorous tone also adds to our engagement in the story. In addition to being entertaining,
Montresors sinister (and usually somewhat lame) jokes (like the one about how he gets his servants out
of the house in paragraph 24) make us believe, for a moment, that everything is going be OK. If we can
still laugh, it must not be so bad. When things get rough for Fortunato, we feel a little guilty for having
laughed before
WRITING STYLE

Ironic

Irony probably doesnt sound very terrifying, but irony contributes hugely to the spine-tingling power of
The Cask. You can find irony in every line of the story.

Critic and teacher Charles N. Nevi says that its a crime not to talk about irony when talking about The
Cask. Irony basically means that somebody says one thing, but means the opposite. A good example is
when there is only one stone left to fit into the wall, and Fortunato says, Let us be gone. This is ironic
because hed have to be a complete fool to think Montresor is going to undo all those layers of bricks
and let him out. Hes hoping against hope.

Montresors reply is even more ironic, Yes, let us be gone. Hes torturing Fortunato with his irony
and has been all along. Come to think of it, hes been torturing us with irony, too. We never know if he
means if he means what he says.

Irony is a kind of play. We arent talking about a stage production, but rather, the use of language in a
playful way. In this case, the stylistic play is twisted and creepy.