Poe's "The Cask Of Amontillado"
Teaching them irony -- and Edgar Allan Poe's dark humor
One of the most traditional — and and enjoyable — assignments every year was racking up Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story, “The Cask Of Amontillado.” Like most Poe stories, it’s creepy, it’s fun and on the day we did it, we would always have the room completely dark, I’d bring in a record or use a Youtube site to play strange and eerie Halloween sounds, just to set the mood right.
Then we’d watch this terrific short film of Poe’s story of revenge, a man whose family — and he — had been so insulted by this wine-addicted alcoholic that he vowed the kind of revenge that would be complete. And, it was important to him to get away with it. Which Poe notes, proudly in the last line, he does.
From the stories we’ve read, the biographies and life details of Poe’s existence, he doesn’t like someone you’d want to party with. But you had to like his very dark sense of humor. What does he decide to name the dim-witted character of his who will die in this story in a most awful way? Why, FORTUNATO, of course!
Biographers believe that Poe may have gotten the idea for the story from an actual news that happened long ago. The precise details are sketchy but supposedly, they knocked down an old Army barracks somewhere in the midwest. And when they did, they found the skeleton of a particularly difficult former officer, who mysteriously disappeared at some point. He had been chained to the inner wall of the barrack and apparently starved to death.
In “Amontillado,” Poe jumps right into the story, explaining that the “thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.”
The story is a fun one to teach because of the calm, even way Montresor, Poe’s narrator, tells the tale. There’s nothing sensational about the way he shares it, he merely describes what happens and how he lured the drunk Fortunato to his basement with the promise of a taste of Amontillado.
When he falls for the trap, he chains him to a sort of closet, then closes it up, brick-by-brick, which Fortunato, at first thinks it’s a joke, then panics, then tries even a blood-curdling scream.
But when Montresor responds with the kind of scream that only a deranged man would offer, Fortunato realizes he’s a goner.
To make the irony sweeter, Poe has him dressed in a clown outfit for the Carnival that’s going on. So when he finally dies, Poe lets us hear the little bell on the top of his hat ring one last time. It’s such a delightfully wicked sensory detail, one that gave everybody in class the shivers when we read it.
There are several filmed versions of the story, this one with John Heard seemed to me to be closest to the spirit of the Poe original. After this, there’s a wonderful brief discussion by educator Rebecca Balcarcel’s analysis of the story, which I’d also share with the students, trying to get them to notice the things she spoke about.
This was always one of my student’s favorites. If you’re still in the Halloween mood — and it’s a lot more fun to think about that than Presidential politics which is a horror story of its own — give Poe’s classic tale a look.
John Heard is convincingly insane in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”
Educator Rebecca Balcarcel does a very nice job of explaining and analyzing the story.
The full text of Poe’s story
https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Poe/Amontillado.pdf