Friday, October 10, 2014
The Cask of Amontillado
The story's narrator, Montresor, tells the story of the day that he took his revenge on Fortunato, a fellow nobleman, to an unspecified person who knows him very well. Angry over some unspecified insult, he plots to murder his friend during Carnival when the man is drunk, dizzy, and wearing a jester's motley.
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Probably the creepiest of Poe's stories that I have read. Definitely gave me goosebumps of anticipation! At first the vocabulary and complicated sentences me confused, but as the story rolled on, I was able to follow it quite well.
ReplyDeleteI thought that the text was a little hard to read
ReplyDeleteA thought on why Poe's prose in this story is difficult to read (especially at the beggining and then it gets more straight-forward with simple sentences and dialogue.) All the Latin, French, and Italian words mixed in certainly doesn't help.
ReplyDeleteThe sentence structure at the start is actually quite convoluted. Even the first sentence "The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."
You have to actually parse that sentence out, through its punctuation, to understand what is going on. Rather than Poe writing "I vowed to take revenge on Fortunato who insulted me many times," he set the sentence up in the other way. Let's assume Poe knew what he was doing and this was intentional.
I think the Form of Poe's writing serves to enhance the action of the story. The sentences start as complicated and winding much like going deep into catacombs and the pre-meditated murder plot that Montresor planned out.
At the end of the story the sentences are simple and declarative to emphasize the finality of the story and Fortunato's life.
I most certainly agree. I similarly think that at the beginning of the story it is still fairly innocent , so the writing mirrors that. At the the end, when the story is much darker, the writing is cruder and lowly.
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