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The Cask of Amontillado
"The Cask of Amontillado" builds towards a suspenseful conclusion by presenting, in a chronological way, the method that the narrator uses to get revenge on Fortunato. At the beginning of the...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor, Fortunato's friend, leads him down into his family crypt with the promise of showing Fortunato a pipe of a liquor called Amontillado. It is in the vaults that Fortunato meets his demise....
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor never mentions even one of the "thousand injuries" that Fortunato has supposedly inflicted upon him: The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor is likely telling this story to his confessor at the end of his life. While we don't know this for a fact, several context clues indicate this is an end-of-life confession. First, the...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Poe actually never has Montresor state the specific reasons behind his wanting revenge, though he hints at several possibilities. Although he does mention injuries and insults, he never reveals...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Foreshadowing is a warning or hint of an event that is going to occur later on in a story, movie, or novel. In "The Cask of Amontillado," Poe uses foreshadowing by suggesting something very bad is...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor brings Fortunato into the catacombs beneath his home. Montresor knows all his servants will be away enjoying the Mardi Gras celebrations, so his home is empty. Montresor leads the drunken...
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The Cask of Amontillado
One of the biggest reason has to do with the fact that Fortunato is very, very drunk. The narrator makes sure to have him drink as much wine as possible as they progress along the passageways. Of...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor describes Fortunato as someone who has injured and insulted him one too many times, and so now Montresor has sworn revenge. Montresor also says that Fortunato has only one flaw, and...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Early on in "The Cask of Amontillado," Montresor tells of his plans to get revenge against Fortunato for unspecified insults. Montresor knew Fortunato's biggest weaknesses, his love and knowledge...
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The Cask of Amontillado
The stones and mortar were outside the niche in which Fortunato was chained. They were both concealed under a pile of human bones, as Montresor states. I busied myself among the pile of bones of...
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The Cask of Amontillado
We do not actually know, with any certainty, what crimes Fortunato has committed against Montresor. In the first line of the story, Montresor claims that Fortunato has injured him a "thousand"...
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The Cask of Amontillado
In the first two paragraphs of "The Cask of Amontillado," readers learn that Montresor feels that he has been treated poorly by Fortunato a "thousand" times, but that something else has recently...
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The Cask of Amontillado
It is mostly Fortunato's pride and arrogance that renders him vulnerable to Montresor's plans. Montresor knows that Fortunato will not be able to resist the implication that Luchesi is as good a...
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The Cask of Amontillado
It is apparent that Montresor feels revenge is justifiable when insults and injuries go beyond the pale [outside the boundaries of normal behavior]. Poe's unreliable narrator explains to his...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor re-echos and surpasses his victim's desperate cries for help in order to show Fortunato that his cries are useless. By doubling the volume of the noise being made, Montresor demonstrates...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor is an especially effective enemy of Fortunato for a few reasons, not the least of which are his intense pride and ability to manipulate. As he says early on, "I must not only punish but...
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The Cask of Amontillado
No, Montresor does not make his plans for Fortunato totally explicit before they descend into his family's vaults. He plans, of course, to murder Fortunato by walling him up alive near the bodies...
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The Cask of Amontillado
When Fortunato exclaims, "'Amontillado? A pipe? Impossible!'" Montresor seems to admit to Fortunato that he also has some doubts about whether or not the pipe of Amontillado he claims to have...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Cast of Amontillado," is the story of Montresor's revenge against Fortunato. It is clear from the text that Fortunato and Montresor have a history together, and...
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The Cask of Amontillado
1) Write a few sentences from the point of view of Fortunato or of the listener. From the listener's perspective, Montresor's narrative is engaging and disturbing at once. Montresor begins by...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Our only clue to whom Montresor is speaking is found in the second line of the story, when Montresor says, "You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor's plan to enact his revenge against Fortunato makes use of his wine cellar as the scene of the murder. To lure Fortunato away from the crowds gathered for Carnival, Montresor claims to...
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The Cask of Amontillado
In the opening paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado," the first-person narrator Montresor vows revenge against the perceived insults he has endured at the hands of...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor does not experience satisfaction with the perfect crime he has committed. Instead he says: My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. He has called to...
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The Cask of Amontillado
An antagonist is a character (or group of characters) that opposes the protagonist either directly or indirectly. Edgar Allan Poe penned the story "The Cask of Amontillado" in 1846. The protagonist...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Cask of Amontillado," is the tale of Montresor describing his revenge upon Fortunato, who insulted him. His family motto is "Nemo me impune lacessit," which is...
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The Cask of Amontillado
There is not a lot of information about Fortunato's character in the story. Poe tells us that he is a man "to be respected and even feared," but it is also clear that he is a bit of a bully and...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Though his dark subject matter is not universally appealing, Edgar Allan Poe was a superb technician and his skill in crafting this revenge tale through the use of symbolism is undeniable. A single...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor feels like a crime is not the perfect crime unless you get away with it. This story is about a man who meticulously plans and carries out another man’s murder. He gives no reason for...
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The Yellow Wallpaper
In the short stories "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Cask of Amontillado," both authors, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar Allan Poe, respectively, create narrators the reader can empathize with....
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The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado” was published in 1846, less than three years before the author’s death. Set in Venice during the Carnival season -- traditionally a...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor, the first-person narrator of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado," describes the carnival as "supreme madness." By this, he is referring to the raucous drinking and celebration which occurs...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe's chilling short story "The Cask of Amontillado" is a tale of retribution. In the outset, the first person narrator Montresor vows revenge against his supposed friend Fortunato over...
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The Cask of Amontillado
In the first paragraph of the story Montresor states: At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled—but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor, the narrator, seeks revenge on Fortunato because he feels that Fortunato has insulted him. He says, in the first line, "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could,...
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The Cask of Amontillado
The story would have been very different if told from Fortunato’s perspective. The main reason is that we have no idea what the motive for the murder is. This is always one of the main things...
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The Cask of Amontillado
The narrative of "The Cask of Amontillado" by Poe generates a mood of dreadful suspense that leads to horror. In this disturbing story of deranged revenge and terror, the reader is in suspense from...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Catacombs were natural geographical features that had existed for millions of years. Some palazzi were evidently built over catacombs, but it would be a mistake to suppose that "catacombs were...
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Moby Dick
First, according to a search on the Google Ngram viewer, this particular phrase "living life to its fullest" originated in the 1920s, had a few brief years of moderate popularity, and then did not...
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The Cask of Amontillado
I will give you two themes I think are important to the story. They are in no particular order. One theme of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is revenge. This should be a fairly obvious theme....
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor is an extremely proud man. It is the fact that he feels so injured and insulted by Fortunato that causes him to seek the most violent and permanent revenge possible: he wants to kill his...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor plans to exact his revenge on Fortunato by killing him, so that certainly involves the idea of death. Montresor feels he has been injured too many times by his proud nemesis, so he comes...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor has "vowed revenge" for what he calls the "thousand injuries" of Fortunato. What these injuries are the reader never learns. Instead, Poe's unreliable narrator describes how revenge must...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor is insane, vengeful, cunning, deceitful, and murderous. Montresor is not in his right mind. He is some kind of psychopath, imagining things that are not real. He imagines that Fortunato...
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The Cask of Amontillado
It seems likely that Montresor doesn't even have a coat of arms or a family motto--and that Fortunato knows it! This may be an example of the thousand injuries Montresor has suffered at Fortunato's...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor and Fortunato are both upper-class, but Fortunato belongs to a more privileged group than Montresor. We do not have much background on Montresor and Fortunato, but we can tell that they...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Fortunato would be mainly interested in what there was for him to gain out of Montresor's request for help. Montresor tells him two important things. One is that he bought a whole pipe of...
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The Cask of Amontillado
Montresor seems to be bragging about his cleverness in planning his perfect crime and his success in bringing it off as planned. First he takes pains to ensure that everyone will think he and...
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The Cask of Amontillado
In the opening paragraph, Montresor explains his motive for wanting revenge against Fortunato for a thousand injuries and a recent insult. Then Montresor specifies what he will accept as complete...