The Cask of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" is similar to many of Poe's stories where he convinces you that the narrator is a normal person, in the beginning. Poe's word choice and ability with talking in the first person convinces the reader to think the narrator is a good person who had been wronged. I think its brilliant that Poe uses different phrases and word choices to hint to Fortunato and the reader that the narrator's intentions were not what we initially thought. The narrator tells Fortunato the motto of where they were going was "Nemo me impune lacessit" which means "No one harms me unpunished" (937). This is so ironic and funny to put into the story as he is convincing Fortunato they are going to do something worth while. Fortunato's name in itself is ironic because fortune is the exact opposite of what Fortunato gets. One of the best parts of the story for me was the very end. The narrator says, "My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so" (939). Realistically one would assume he was sick because he just buried a man alive, but of course this is not the case. This is another way of Poe trying to fool the reader that the narrator isn't as crazy as we were lead to believe. For a split second we considered the narrator to feel guilty for what he had done, but it was the opposite.