illustration of Fortunato standing in motley behind a mostly completed brick wall with a skull superimposed on the wall where his face should be

The Cask of Amontillado

by Edgar Allan Poe

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Student Question

What are your thoughts on the ending of "The Cask of Amontillado"? Should fictional murderers be punished?

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In "The Cask of Amontillado," Poe's choice to set the story in a different time and place allows for the unpunished crime to be more palatable to audiences. Fictional murderers do not necessarily need to be punished, as literary works can explore themes of justice and guilt without moral obligations placed on authors. The story's ending intensifies its horror, leaving a memorable impression as Fortunato faces a grim fate, highlighting timeless human cruelty.

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This is a logical question. If Poe had written about the same crime being perpetrated in his own country and in his own time, he would probably not have been able to get it published. A writer might be free to write anything he liked, but editors and publishers would be severely criticized, if not censored. Poe deliberately stages the crime in a different country and in an earlier time period. At the end Montresor tells the reader:

Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

So the murder occurred at least fifty years before the narrative was published. It is not unreasonable to assume that Montresor himself is already dead. This story is supposedly not written by a man named Edgar Allan Poe but by someone named Montresor. Presumably it was a handwritten letter found...

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among some old papers and translated into English by Poe. The letter could have been found among the papers of the unnamed recipient, or it might have been found among Montresor's own papers after his death. He might have written it and decided not to send it. 

This was Poe's way of writing a perfect-crime story and getting it published. In his other murder stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," the murderer gets caught. 

As to the question of whether authors have an obligation to punish murderers for their fictional crimes, there is no authority to impose this obligation on all the writers in the world. Poe may have established a precedent with "The Cask of Amontillado." By now there must have been many books and stories in which murderers go unpunished, even by their own consciences. Roald Dahl wrote two well-known stories in which this happens. They are "Lamb to the Slaughter" and "The Way Up to Heaven." In the enotes Summary of James Dickey's novel Deliverance (1970) the final sentence reads:

The survivors find deliverance back in the civilized world, unrepentant and unpunished after killing several men, disposing of their bodies, and lying repeatedly to the law.

The ending of "The Cask of Amontillado" is the best part, regardless of whether or not we think Montresor should be punished. Fortunato is left to die of starvation and madness in the darkness, knowing that his family will never find out what happened to him and realizing that Montresor made a complete fool of him. It leaves the reader with the intended feeling of horror. Readers remember the story because of its ending. The chains already fastened to the rock wall remind us that human cruelty is as old as humanity itself.

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