A corollary of the theme of hypocrisy involves the story's alleged moral. Poe's works are at least implicitly nihilistic, given that he repeatedly shows the most amoral of characters acting out their fantasies without regard for the lives and feelings of others. At times, in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the killer is caught, and retribution, the reader is to understand, will follow. But in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the killer is never reprimanded. His own self-justification, as noted, is hypocritical, and Poe evidently intends it to be seen that way. But in any tale where a wrong is unredressed, the implied moral is that on some level, the wrong is justified and is therefore not a wrong at all. It is a kind of negation of morality, or at least a theme that anticipates the existentialist writers in showing the individual as the creator of his own system of right and wrong, rather than as a follower of religion and convention.