“For the love of God, Montresor!”
(See Important Quotations Explained)
Summary
The narrator, Montresor, opens the story by stating that
he has been irreparably insulted by his acquaintance, Fortunato,
and that he seeks revenge. He wants to exact this revenge, however,
in a measured way, without placing himself at risk. He decides to
use Fortunato’s fondness for wine against him. During the carnival
season, Montresor, wearing a mask of black silk, approaches Fortunato.
He tells Fortunato that he has acquired something that could pass
for Amontillado, a light Spanish sherry. Fortunato (Italian for
“fortunate”) wears the multicolored costume of the jester, including
a cone cap with bells. Montresor tells Fortunato that if he is too
busy, he will ask a man named Luchesi to taste it. Fortunato apparently
considers Luchesi a competitor and claims that this man could not
tell Amontillado from other types of sherry. Fortunato is anxious
to taste the wine and to determine for Montresor whether or not
it is truly Amontillado. Fortunato insists that they go to Montresor’s vaults.
Montresor has strategically planned for this meeting by
sending his servants away to the carnival. The two men descend into
the damp vaults, which are covered with nitre, or saltpeter, a whitish mineral.
Apparently aggravated by the nitre, Fortunato begins to cough. The
narrator keeps offering to bring Fortunato back home, but Fortunato
refuses. Instead, he accepts wine as the antidote to his cough.
The men continue to explore the deep vaults, which are full of the
dead bodies of the Montresor family. In response to the crypts,
Fortunato claims to have forgotten Montresor’s family coat of arms
and motto. Montresor responds that his family shield portrays “a
huge human foot d’or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent
rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel.” The motto, in Latin,
is “nemo me impune lacessit,” that is, “no one attacks me with impunity.”
Later in their journey, Fortunato makes a hand movement
that is a secret sign of the Masons, an exclusive fraternal organization. Montresor
does not recognize this hand signal, though he claims that he is
a Mason. When Fortunato asks for proof, Montresor shows him his
trowel, the implication being that Montresor is an actual stonemason.
Fortunato says that he must be jesting, and the two men continue
onward. The men walk into a crypt, where human bones decorate three
of the four walls. The bones from the fourth wall have been thrown
down on the ground. On the exposed wall is a small recess, where
Montresor tells Fortunato that the Amontillado is being stored.
Fortunato, now heavily intoxicated, goes to the back of the recess.
Montresor then suddenly chains the slow-footed Fortunato to a stone.
Taunting Fortunato with an offer to leave, Montresor begins
to wall up the entrance to this small crypt, thereby trapping Fortunato inside.
Fortunato screams confusedly as Montresor builds the first layer
of the wall. The alcohol soon wears off and Fortunato moans, terrified
and helpless. As the layers continue to rise, though, Fortunato
falls silent. Just as Montresor is about to finish, Fortunato laughs
as if Montresor is playing a joke on him, but Montresor is not joking.
At last, after a final plea, “For the love of God, Montresor!” Fortunato
stops answering Montresor, who then twice calls out his enemy’s
name. After no response, Montresor claims that his heart feels sick
because of the dampness of the catacombs. He fits the last stone
into place and plasters the wall closed, his actions accompanied
only by the jingling of Fortunato’s bells. He finally repositions
the bones on the fourth wall. For fifty years, he writes, no one
has disturbed them. He concludes with a Latin phrase meaning “May
he rest in peace.”
Analysis
The terror of “The Cask of Amontillado,” as in many of
Poe’s tales, resides in the lack of evidence that accompanies Montresor’s
claims to Fortunato’s “thousand injuries” and “insult.” The story
features revenge and secret murder as a way to avoid using legal
channels for retribution. Law is nowhere on Montresor’s—or Poe’s—radar screen,
and the enduring horror of the story is the fact of punishment without
proof. Montresor uses his subjective experience of Fortunato’s insult
to name himself judge, jury, and executioner in this tale, which
also makes him an unreliable narrator. Montresor confesses this
story fifty years after its occurrence; such a significant passage
of time between the events and the narration of the events makes
the narrative all the more unreliable. Montresor’s unreliability
overrides the rational consideration of evidence, such as particular
occurrences of insult, that would necessarily precede any guilty sentence
in a non-Poe world. “The Cask of Amontillado” takes subjective interpretation—the
fact that different people interpret the same things differently—to
its horrific endpoint.
Poe’s use of color imagery is central to his questioning
of Montresor’s motives. His face covered in a black silk mask, Montresor
represents not blind justice but rather its Gothic opposite: biased revenge.
In contrast, Fortunato dons the motley-colored costume of the court
fool, who gets literally and tragically fooled by Montresor’s masked
motives. The color schemes here represent the irony of Fortunato’s
death sentence. Fortunato, Italian for “the fortunate one,” faces
the realization that even the carnival season can be murderously
serious. Montresor chooses the setting of the carnival for its abandonment
of social order. While the carnival usually indicates joyful social
interaction, Montresor distorts its merry abandon, turning the carnival
on its head. The repeated allusions to the bones of Montresor’s
family that line the vaults foreshadow the story’s descent into
the underworld. The two men’s underground travels are a metaphor
for their trip to hell. Because the carnival, in the land of the
living, does not occur as Montresor wants it to, he takes the carnival
below ground, to the realm of the dead and the satanic.
