Themes In The Cask Of Amontillado

Edgar Allan Poe is an American Gothic author from the 19th century. It is well known that Edgar Allan Poe was a master of suspense. The word ‘suspense’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary to be ‘A state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.’ Two of Poe’s works are ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House Usher’. ‘Ligeia’ is the story of an unnamed narrator in love with his wife Lady Ligeia and how he copes with her death. ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ is the story of an unnamed narrator visiting his friend Roderick Usher at his house. Both of them are full of suspense and this is the main topic this essay will be focusing on. This essay will attempt to illustrate how Poe builds suspense in his short stories

“The Haunted Palace” is one of Edgar Allen Poe’s mysterious and phantasmagoric poems. Written in the same year as “The Devil in the Belfry,” and included in his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Haunted Palace” is another tale of innocence and happiness now corroded with sorrow and madness. It is fairly easy to say that “The Haunted Palace” is a metaphor for Poe’s own ghostly troubled mind, more than it is about a decaying palace. For in 1839, it was found in a book that the main character in “The Fall of the House of Usher” comes across. In the context of its appearance in “Usher,” it is startlingly clear that this is no fable of earthly decay, but one of mental and spiritual ruin.

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous writer in writing detective stories and horror stories. One of his horror stories, “The Cask of Amontillado” was talking about how a man took his revenge to his friend. However, to look deeply in this story, I found that this story was not just simply a horror tale about how a man gets his revenge in the safest way. Instead, it also demonstrates much irony in several areas: the title, the event, the season, the costume, the environment, the characters’ personalities, a man’s dignity and cockiness and at the end, the public order. he are

In this essay, I will be comparing the characterization of two narrators in Edgar Allan Poe’s work, which are “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven”. “The Fall of the House of Usher” was published in 1839, and years later “The Raven” was published in 1845. Poe shows that the two narrators fall into anxiety due to Gothic and mysterious elements.

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a goosebump-evoking tale that follows one man’s twisted plot for revenge. Although carnival season is in full-swing above ground, Fortunato finds himself being lead to his death underground in the catacombs. His “past insults” will ensure that he will never again participate in such feasts and merriment; Montresor, his “frenemy”, will make sure of that. As if the story isn’t creepy enough, Poe uses dialogue and sensory details to produce a mood that is both suspenseful and dark.

While Poe did not use any extraneous details in The Cask of Amontillado, he certainly did not skimp on detail when it was needed. His description of the inner recess of the catacombs, an area which could be simply explained, was very specific and to the point. “At the remote end of the the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris… Within the wall thus exposed by displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior recess.” Poe goes on to give the dimensions of the inner recess and a brief yet fitting description of what the interior of the room looked like. The description of this seemingly unimportant yet crucial room allows the reader to properly visualize the scene and immerse themselves even deeper into the story. Using simple imagery like this allows the readers to better visualize what a room looks like. It allows a reader to put themselves into the story and immerse themselves within it. While this is a more detailed form of description, a simpler form can have the same effect. When chained up, Poe describes the movements and struggle of Fortunato. Poe spends an entire paragraph going on about the sporadic flails and hopeless efforts of resistance that Fortunato makes in an attempt to get off the wall. While the

When writing “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe used the setting outside of the mansion to illustrate the theme of the fear of death. From the outset, the Rodrick Usher’s home is portrayed in a way that gives the reader a feeling of alarm. For example, the narrator mentions the house gives him a feeling of “insufferable gloom” (Usher 1). By pointing this out, the reader begins to feel on edge as the connotation of “gloom” is unwelcoming and distressing. The home is also said to have “vacant eye like windows” (Usher 1) which make the narrator

An important element in any story is setting. Authors use setting to convey certain feelings brought on by the character’s surroundings. It also subliminally serves to illustrate the character’s intentions. In “The Cask of Amontillado” Edgar Allen Poe uses the dark, imposing setting to do just that, communicate the underlying theme of the story, being death, revenge and deception.

It is Edgar Allan Poe's intense use of symbolism and irony throughout the Cask of Amontillado that establishes the short story as an indeed interesting candidate worthy of thorough analysis. The skillful use of these devices are utilized by the author to create this horrific and suspenseful masterpiece.

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, sets a tone that is dark, gloomy, and threatening. His inclusion of highly descriptive words and various forms of figurative language enhance the story’s evil nature, giving the house and its inhabitants eerie and “supernatural” qualities. Poe’s effective use of personification, symbolism, foreshadowing, and doubling create a morbid tale leading to, and ultimately causing, the fall of (the house of) Usher.

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

"I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong." With these ferverous words from the introductory paragraph of Edgar Allan Poe's Cask of Amontillado, the story of Montresor's revenge begins. Poe repeatedly stresses the need for revenge due to bitterness and resentment in Montresor's character towards Fortunato, but more importantly, stress is placed on revenge by which the victim realizes their injustice towards the redresser. Unfortunately, it seems that Montresor is denied this pure and encompassing revenge when his victim,

The "Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado" are two of Edgar Allan Poe's most well-known and noteworthy stories. This paper compares and contrasts the two stories and provides and outline as well.

The Cask of Amontillado is considered to be one of the best short stories. Written by Edgar Allan Poe in first person and having all the main events as a three hundred page fiction book, The Cask of Amontillado is a complete novel. This short story has several themes which function from the first page of the story such as: suspense, fear, and revenge.

“The Fall of the House of Usher (1939)”, arguably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous short story, is a tale centered around the mysterious House of Usher and its equally indiscernible inhabitants. These subjects are plagued with physical and mental degradation – the Usher siblings suffer from various abnormal ailments and unexplained fears, while the house itself seems to be tethering on the edge of collapse. The gothic elements in the story are distributed generously, and the plot is increasingly ridden with the supernatural as it progresses.