Though many critics and scholars like to discuss the “terror” of The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allen Poe, the word doesn’t truly suit the story’s mood. The story’s sense of inexorable doom rides on its juxtaposition of ominous characters against a tranquile setting in the introduction, and colorful characters on a bleak background for the remainder of the tale. Poe primes the reader for a grisly ending with visual clues early, so the literal and figurative descent is far less terrifying than it is disquieting. By introducing elements of the macabre early and gradually saturating the story’s atmosphere with ominous details, Edgar Allen Poe crafts a suffocating mood of impending and inexorable doom in The Cask of Amontillado. The Cask of …show more content…
As the torches start “rather to glow than flame,” The man who was once a bright, cheerful character, a character who embodied the idea of hope, now resembles the town drunkard – lost, confused, effectively all alone chained to a block of granite. Fortunato’s choice of attire now serves to mock him, looking almost cartoonish on the body of a sick, drunk, helpless man. The story ends with the immurement of Fortunato; a very appropriate execution given the story’s progression. Fortunato is forced to watch as every last shred of hope is ripped from his hands with each stone Montresor places. It is only natural that Fortunato should get to watch as the darkness slowly consumes him as the reader has seen all along. The Cask is an exploration of totality in four distinct parts: the first signs of danger, the rise, the consumption, and the conclusion. Poe’s story doesn’t conform to the standard mold of horror because it never once promises a modicum of hope; every last ray of light is gradually snuffed out and the reader is never led to believe that Fortunato has any chance of escape. The tale finds a dichotomy between hope and despair not in comparisons between the current situation and what could be, but between the current situation and what used to be. It is not a terrifying example of the macabre, but a sad, even pathetic allegory to a human being’s final