Edgar Allen Poe's The Cask Of Amontillado - Literature review Example

John Doe Mary Roe English 000 7 April 2009 The Cask Of Amontillado In Edger Allan Poe's short story The Cask Of Amontillado, although it is only three pages long, we can see a miniature all the elements that Edger Allan Poe repeatedly uses in all of the stories and poems. His themes are almost a perfect precursor of all of the main themes and preoccupations of the 20th century, and his techniques of mood and psychological extraction presages many of the later techniques utilized by many of the great writers of our own time. In fact Poe perhaps is the first great writer to deal with many of the issues of the unconscious, the subconscious, and the dark forces of the Id that were later exposed by such great writers as Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jules Verne in the 19th century, and such writers as Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Steven King, and Joyce Carol Oates, and the film maker David Cronenberg in the 20th century. Cronenberg actually pays particular homage to Poe in one of his most popular films: His "Dead Zone" (based on a story by Stephen King, like Kubrick's "The Shining" opens with a recitation of a "The Raven" and deals with the dissolution of a man of exaggerated sensitivity... The self-destructive twins of Dead Ringers recall pose the various doppelgngers with boundary issues. (Hayes.p128) Edger Allan Poe was a master in the art of creating a mood of suspense, tension, mood, and terror. And all of his works we find elements of bleakness and suspense, often times mixed with strange and unsettling elements of depravity and perversity; yet paradoxically in most of his works the narrator, although often times submerged or controlled to the point of abject subjugation or subsisting in total despair, almost consistently manages to overcome whatever terrible situation he is confronted with, generally through the application of the rational power of mind. In The Cask Of Amontillado one of the main elements that we find is the passage of the main character into the depths of a dank and dark cavern or labyrinth. In many respects we can look at the two characters that descend into the depths of the cellar in The Cask Of Amontillado as representing two aspects of the personality of the narrator. While on the surface it may appear that in The Cask Of Amontillado we are presented with the tale of an horrendous crime committed by the narrator against someone who the narrator seems to hold some great but yet unstated grievance against, in my opinion what we are really presented with in this story is the tale of the repression by the narrator of an aspect of his personality that he cannot face dealing with, and which he must bind and secure, and seal up in the darkness, forever, until the time of his own death. In other words, the narrator is locking away forever what we might call today in Freud's terminology the Id. Freud himself, in the preface to the main scholarly work on Poe, took note of this: "My friend and student Marie Bonaparte has projected the light of psychoanalysis onto the life and work of a great writer with pathological tendencies." (Bonaparte: preface) Other theorist and writer have also noted the similarities between the main thrust of Freud's work and Poe's writings: Yet by 1933 when Marie Bonaparte published her 700 page "Edger Poe - A Psychoanalytic Study", it was clear that psychoanalysis could inspire new and innovative ways of reading literature. Theorists and critics quickly recognize the opportunities both presented for psychoanalytic study, given his thick shins emphasis on hidden motives and detection, altered states of consciousness, sadism, and obsession as well as the self destructive tendencies he exhibited in his own life" (Peeples p29-30) We can see each of the elements that are in miniature in The Cask Of Amontillado in three of the most popular short stories by Edger Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Pit and The Pendulum. The Fall of the House of Usher is a bleak and desolate story that recounts the visit of a nave and genteel gentleman to the ancestral mansion of an old friend whom he has not seen since childhood. The narrator describes seeing the mansion on his approach reflected in a fetid pond and appearing to be almost diabolically captivating in its impression upon him. Again, this is a common element in Poe's works. The mansion that the narrator approaches lies before a deep and bottomless chasm that he must cross over before entering. Once inside, the narrator, as always in Edgar Allan Poe's works, unnamed, finds his childhood friend, Roderick Usher, in a most deplorable state. The friend is pale and sepulchral in appearance. He describes to his old friend how he has delved into some sort of occult practices and study, which has left him virtually invalid and prematurely aged. In the course of the visit, the friend reveals to the narrator that his twin sister whom the narrator has not met before, is on the verge of death. Soon the twin sister apparently dies, and together with Roderick Usher the narrator helps entomb the sister in the family crypt, deep in the basement of the ancient and decrepit mansion. Yet it happens that later, in the middle of the friend's exposition of his descent into depravity, perversity, and noxious explorations into forbidden realms of occult knowledge, the sister reappears, after having clawed her way out of a living entombment. She destroys her brother and brings down through some sort of cataclysmic magic the entire mansion, which falls upon itself into the bottomless chasm over which the narrator crossed over earlier. So once again we have in this story Edger Allan Poe's eerie presentiment of the dark psychological theories and beliefs that came to great prominence in the later 19th and twentieth centuries. The essential themes are remarkably similar to those in The Cask Of Amontillado, specifically the concept of the entombment of unwanted and unacceptable impulses and the consequential destruction of one who falls prey to their malign appeal. The narrator represents rationality in conformity to standard acceptable social norms. The master of the House of Usher represents the impermissible passage into an acceptance of practices of things which are and should be condemned by civilized society, in this case perhaps incest and deviant sexuality. In another popular story by Edger Allan Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, we find many of the same elements that are in miniature in The Cask Of Amontillado such as the conflict between rationality and unbridled passion, death, civilization contrasted with primitive freedom, and immurement. Poe sets the stage in this story with a brief discourse on the contrast between analytical thought and pure sentiment. He uses the character of the prototypical detective Dupin as a template for an examination of the possibilities of rational thought in the world of unbridled passion, and how that rational thought may be used to unravel the mysteries of the life itself. In the case of this story the escaped orangutan that has been brought into civilization by the wild and free sailor represents the subconscious. Dupin, the detective is used to establish a contrast between the wild ape and the methods of civilization. The tale contrasts the ferocity of the killings coolness of Dupin rationality, and this emphasizes that the orangutan represents a rational, mindless violence (Smith, p.64) The detective himself is obsessed with the concept of darkness, and how that darkness can be successfully navigated. In fact the story notes that the detective Dupin often traverses the Demi-monde after dark in search of its hidden secrets. Typical for Poe, the detective Dupin has two personalities, one for the day and one for the night. On a social level it should be noted that Dupin's apparent superiority actually appears to generate social isolation, one in which it is presence has been he raced through social amnesia. As the narrator notes, it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris, which implies not so much social superiority as social irrelevance (Smith, p. 66) Also typical for Poe is the element of the death of a beautiful woman, and that represents in this story the carnal pleasures of life, specifically relating to the fact of the presence of the gold in her apartment. Once again in this story someone, a beautiful woman, is forcibly immured, this time in the depths of a chimney, which represents the passions of the world entombed through the excesses of unbridled primitive passion, similar to the entombment of the unbridled release of drunkenness that we find in The Cask Of Amontillado. The last of the classic Poe stories in which we find typical elements that are present in The Cask Of Amontillado is the terrifying tale of The Pit and The Pendulum. Poe begins his tail with a brief discourse on what we call today the subconscious, in the form of sleep and dreaming. The narrator takes us in his memories into the typical Poe scenario of a descent into a dank, musty, slimy pit. The narrator in his memories is confused and is not sure whether what he is experiencing is a memory or is in the present. He is convicted of some heinous crime. He is cast into a dank, dark, slimy pit where he is bound and secured. After a period of time he discovers that a sharp pendulum hanging above his head is slowly swinging down towards him. The narrator's salvation, once again, comes through the harnessing of the power of reason. This theme, the triumph of reason over insensate nature is, in different form, the same that is present in The Cask Of Amontillado, and indeed in almost all of Poe's stories and poems. Works Cited Poe, Edgar Allan. (ed: April 2003), Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales& Poems New York: Castle Books. Bonaparte, Marie. (1949). The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe, a Pychoanalytic Iterpretation (John Rodker, Trans.). London: Imago. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/5030216 Ronald Clark Harvey. The Critical History of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: "a Dialogue with Unreason" Routledge, 1998 http://books.google.com/bookshl=en&lr=&id=HzWKNf8Lzu8C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Ronald+Clark+Harvey&ots=pMDc1mrtVs&sig=Vv8q17EgAewWNyNBHB7FgP3trD0 Scott Peeples. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe dition: Ilustrated, Boydell & Brewer, 2007 http://books.google.com/bookshl=en&lr=&id=NyEumvZL1QMC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=Scott+Peeples&ots=GI89nal8jw&sig=r2qU-C0nzAszsDwEyPQh0jT8W0 Kevin J. Hayes. The Cambridge companion to Edgar Allan Poe Edition: illustrated, Cambridge University Press, 2002 http://scholar.google.com/scholarq=Kevin+J.+Hayes&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N Andrew Smith. Gothic Literature Edinburgh University Press, 2007 http://books.google.com/bookshl=en&lr=&id=8fhR-D-T7MQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=Andrew+Smith+Gothic+Literature+&ots=SNYCxkSfSz&sig=bGAjogokRquQ2NZubLtSpvo3Uuo#PPR9,M1 Read More