of Amontillado” suggests a different thesis. In this story, the narrator does successfully store away Fortunato. Here, Poe gives the narrator (whose name appears to be Montresor) a relatively logical motive for wanting to kill someone. The narrator’s target, Fortunato, has been the source of a “thousand injuries.” In this narrative, there is some kind of tangible reason: revenge. It’s possible to argue that the narrator is not repressing a desire but confronting his alleged problem. Within this short story, entombing comes across as a symbol of dominance. Now, it’s the narrator who is harming Fortunato. As Fortunato's corpse doesn’t haunt the narrator, it appears as if the narrator retains his power.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado,” Edgar Allan Poe explores the depths of human fear and depravity. This is likely why he is so obsessed with burying his characters alive and symbolic representations of corpses. Let's look at this more closely and see how Poe compares to the European Gothic genre.

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe's narrator kills an old man simply because of the man's eye. The narrator grows obsessed with that eye and despises how it looks at him. It is an evil eye, he decides. Therefore, even though the old man has never wronged the narrator, the narrator kills him; however, guilt overwhelms the narrator almost at once, and his madness increases. He hears the beating of the old man's heart, which he has buried under the floor. The officers apparently hear nothing, for the heart is not truly beating. The narrator hears it within himself (although he thinks he hears it in reality). The dead yet beating heart symbolizes the throbbing of his conscience. We can see, then, how Poe shows someone who is so depraved, so irrationally fearful that he kills another person. Then his action comes back to haunt him, and his fear and depravity increase to pure madness. A human being can only handle so much fear and guilt before losing his or her mind.

In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor has suffered one too many insults from Fortunato, and he decides that he will take his revenge in the most hideous way. He plans carefully and slowly, leaving nothing to chance. He will lure Fortunato into the catacombs with the promise of tasting a fine cask of Amontillado and then wall him up and leave him there, buried alive. The fear of being buried alive (which is called taphephobia) was common in Poe's day, and there were many true horror stories circulating about such incidents. Poe recognized being buried alive as one of the most horrifying experiences that anyone can undergo; therefore, he used it to explore the depths of fear in many of his stories. Again, he wanted to reflect on how much fear a person can handle before going crazy (like Fortunato) and how much fear a depraved person can inflict before going crazy (like Montressor).

As for the European Gothic genre, we might argue that Poe uses it as a starting place and then develops it further. The Gothic is all about fear, mystery, and horror, and Poe's works are heavy on all of those. Yet Poe offers more in the way of psychological terror than many European Gothic works, including his live burial motif.