![]() ![]() It was the name of a countship, i.e., of a fief designated by the name. Montresor was not a family name but is of French origin. ![]() The story takes place in eighteenth-century France. Montresor tells of the motive and the execution of the perfect crime he committed in the fictional past (50 years previously) to a silent, unidentified listener in the fictional present. ![]() As a whole "The Cask" consists of two narratives, each of which has its appropriate dialectic and rhetoric. Various images in the text suggest archetypal acts such as the quest for the original substance or the universal solvent, the quest for the Holy Grail, and the quest for Solomon's Secret Vault and the Stone of Foundation connected with the tetragrammaton (a Jewish and later a Masonic symbol). If "The Cask" seems simply a story of a clever and successful revenge, it is also the story of a failed quest that goes much beyond the simple search for the cask of Amontillado, a dark-colored Spanish sherry. ![]() The dialogue amounts to a duel with words, which is unusual since Poe rarely depended much on dialogue in constructing his stories. It is especially notable for two reasons: its subtle, ironic treatment of a passionate but coldly calculated plot to bury a man alive to satisfy an aristocrat's honor and its superb dialogue between the protagonist, the insulted nobleman Montresor, and his antagonist, the gross bourgeois Italian who has a purchased title, Fortunato. The Edgar Allan Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado" is one of his finest. ![]()
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