Edgar Allan Poe’s the Cask of Amontillado, Essay Example

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado effectively employs the theme of revenge in order to develop a narrative that is immediately psychological in nature. The story is narrated from the perspective of Montresor and revolves around Montresor’s desire to kill Fortunato. The narrative recounts the largely psychological reasons for Montresor’s desire, culminating with Montresor’s enclosing of Fortunato within masonry walls, recalling one of Poe’s standard motifs of live entombment. Yet the thematic of revenge and the eventual murder of Fortunato is largely psychological in nature, as Poe develops a certain pathology of Montresor’s ambition. The reader can understand to an extent that Montresor represents madness in this story: his own logic is a pathological logic; his ethics are a pathological ethics. Accordingly, Poe’s use of the thematic of revenge can be understood as a critique of the pathology of revenge, its indication of a certain psychological disorder and a faulty ethical system.

In Montresor’s recounting of his hatred of Fortunato, many psycho-pathological disorders are evoked through the thematic of revenge. Immediately, Montresor expresses the fact that he is a victim of Fortunato, who has continually psychologically tormented him. Yet it is an “insult” that finally pushes Montresor too far. This is clear in the very first sentence of the story: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.” (1) There is an immediate ambiguity in these lines: if Montresor had already received a “thousand injuries” from Fortunato, why is it that a single insult creates the idea of revenge? The dissonance between the injury and the insult in these lines suggests that Fortunato himself operates according to a certain pathological logic: his own view of reality remains somehow obfuscated. That is, there is an absence of some ability to proportionately evaluate or judge human relations that are expressed in Fortunato’s words.

This pathology is further evinced in that the response to insult is revenge; moreover, a revenge that takes the form of murder. The key ethical imperative of the main character is arguably stated in the outset of the story, when Montresor says: “a wrong is unrepressed when retribution overtakes its redresser.” (1) Thus, the ethical principle of Montresor is that every transgression must be met with a punishment that is more extreme in nature than the transgression itself. Montresor is clear in stating: “I must not only punish but punish with impunity.” (1) There is a certain necessity for Montresor to gain revenge that is arguably a consequence of his entire ethical system.

But this thematic of revenge in Poe’s text clearly shows its pathology in the decision of Montresor to murder Fortunato. Here, Montresor’s ethical system evinces its most diabolical side: Fortunato is to be entombed alive. From the perspective of ethics, this act of revenge can be obviously deemed as disproportionate. For an insult to Montresor, Fortunato is to die. While this response could be understood in the context of some archaic traditional understandings of honor, in which traditional societies take seriously the notion of “losing one’s face”, it seems that Poe does not wish to present this justification of the thematic of revenge. Rather, the entire theme of the story as expressed through the narrator signifies a fundamental madness that is tied to this revenge. The decision for live entombment suggests the extent of this madness, as in this case the punishment once again seems disproportionate to the crime.

Poe thus effectively demonstrates how the thematic of revenge can be understood as a pathological and psychological disorder. What is operative in the text is a certain exaggeration of human relations, in which ethics can assume monstrous forms. As David Herman says of The Cask, “Poe invites us to contemplate one end of the spectrum of human behavior and uses his ending to insist on both the extremity and the humanness of that behavior.” (Herman, 214) Revenge thus serves as a thematic exploration of both ethics and the interpretation of ethics in Poe’s text, an ethics, insofar as it is “extreme”, which demonstrates the pathology of revenge.

Works Cited

Herman, David. The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge, UK: Cambrige University Press, 2007. Poe, Edgar Allan Poe. The Cask of Amontillado.