The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe is a story of revenge, narrated by a man named Montresor, who felt he had been wrong by another man, Fortunato. Two of the conditions this narrator gives in order for his revenge to be seen as successful in his own eyes are to punish with impunity, and to make himself known as the avenger by his victim. To punish with impunity is to punish someone without being caught and to make oneself known is to let the victim know they are being punished. In the narrator's own words, he says that without those two things, the wrong is "unredressed," which basically means not successfully avenged. In the case of this story, Montresor completes neither of his objectives of "punishing with impunity" and making himself felt as the avenger to whoever did him wrong. …show more content…
. .I vowed revenge." Though it is not clear who he is speaking to, it still counts as a confession, so he basically told on himself. The reader never finds out if Montresor gets punished for what he did, yet by just the reader knowing it was done, the deed can no longer be considered a secret. This instance is somewhat like Poe's other story, The Tell-Tale Heart, in which the narrator almost gets away with murder, but ends up giving himself away. In the Tell-Tale Heart, the main character reaches the end of the story and the police are about to leave his house, but he cannot bare the secret anymore, so he confesses. Likewise, as Montresor nears the end of his life, he feels the need to reveal what he has done to whoever the reader assumes is listening, as well as the reader. Even though Montresor never gets arrested, the fact that he did not take this secret to the grave is enough to say he punished with impunity because someone now knows the