In the short story Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allan Poe portrays a dark story of horrid and calculated revenge. Poe is known to be a master of using words and literary elements to create the necessary environment necessary for the story and deriving emotional reactions from the reader. In this story, Poe manipulates point of view and setting as contributing factors to establishing an eerie and unreliable tone and perspective that drive forward the concept of the plot.
The story utilizes a first-person point of view when the narrator named Montresor relates the story. The plot is told from the first person as the pronoun “I” is used and the story is told in the past tense. However, unlike most literary works where the story is told in the past tense and the narrator is objective, therefore reliable – Poe makes the narrator in The Cask of Amontillado intentionally unreliable. Montresor retells the events in a sadistic, manipulative, and somewhat sarcastic tone, which creates dramatic irony. “I would make him pay, yes; but I would act only with the greatest care…the wrong would not be made right unless Fortunato knew that he was paying and knew who was forcing him to pay” (Poe 68). The unreliability of the narrator is shown by this as he attempts to justify a sadistic act as well as showing evidence of psychological inconsistencies.
The setting largely matches the tone of the narrator, described as eerie and dark (Poe 70). The way that Poe characterizes the setting changes as the story progresses, particularly the deeper that the characters descend into the catacombs. At first, it was a deep place under the palace, cool and dark. However, as they go further, the setting is visualized as grim, extremely constrained, and the air barely breathable. The descriptions of small details such as bones spread out on the ground foreshadow the grim end for Fortunato (Poe 71).
Despite being often overlooked, point of view and setting can contribute greatly to the perception of the reader in the tone of the story. Poe highlights the use of the first person in an unreliable narrator to emphasize their dark psychological state which is contributed to the eerie, almost metaphorical descriptions of the setting which contributes to the horrendousness of this story of murderous revenge.
Work Cited
Poe, Edgar A. The Cask of Amontillado. 1847, Web.