The Cask of Amontillado - Essay Example

That is enough to lure one of the main characters into the murderous trap. What Fortunato did to the first-person narrator, Luchresi, remains in the dark, following the intention of the author.            In the text, the killer mentions his family motto “Nemo me impune lacessit,” i.e., H. “Nobody offends me with impunity” or “Nobody attacks me with impunity.” The Latin family motto is not translated in every version of the text to let readers think it over.

            Edgar Allan Poe, as the author, felt well when wrote and published the “Cask…” in 1846 when he was in the War of the Literati, culminating in Poe’s libel complaint. Poe’s opponent was the author Thomas Dunn English; the argument took place in the columns of New York’s Evening Mirror, which was headed by Hiram Fuller that felt to think about himself as a leading public figure and an author. The secret anger of the first-person narrator would then reflect this anger at Thomas Dunn English (Fortunato), with the repeatedly performed Luchesi could refer to Hiram Fuller, whom Poe threatens to call as a judge.

            The author Marie Bonaparte does other equations. In Fortunato, she sees and describes an image of the hated foster father John Allan and places the story in the group of those who treat Poe’s fantasies of fatherly murder in an encrypted form to think about it. Their shared love of wine interprets them as Oedipus rivalry, and in fact, it is hardly possible to avoid the psychoanalytic identification of the vault with the womb.

The fact that he is depicted as a crypt in revenge makes sense when you consider that Poe’s mother and foster mother, as well as his father and foster father, are dead at the time, and his wife is terminally ill.            The author Marie Bonaparte also points to think out that at that time, Poe worshiped the poet Frances Osgood, to whom his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold also felt his eye. Rivalry for the beloved woman could have been a third motive for the story.

            Poe apparently thought that the wine, which is a form of sherry, was an Italian wine variety (“I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself and bought largely whenever I could.”) to which Montresor pretends to captain himself. The European national differences merge from an American distance. It also fits that the first-person narrator has a Roman palazzo, but bears a French name he describes to be gothic. Poe (as in Politian and The Appointment) is attracted by the Italian decor, mask, music, and embedding in ancient fictional traditions that do not exist in the United States, and he also pays homage to Byron’s black romanticism and the motif of revenge between both characters that Poe describes to be realistic.

            In The Cask of Amontillado essay, it turns clear that the narration was set to music on the album Tales of Mystery and Imagination by the Alan Parsons Project so that to make the audience like felt to think that the author has the good sense of black humor.