The murder of Fortunato takes place in the dungeons of Montresor's Italian Renaissance château, although in his pride of place he calls it his "palazzo." It is evidently located on a river somewhere in the Loire Valley. But his indifference to Montresor's coat of arms and his lack of manners peg Fortunato as a bourgeois Italian, newly endowed with a purchased title, an anoblis, whereas Montresor is a noblesse d'épée, a man of the country instead of the court. On the other hand Fortunato is the Italian form of the Latin fortuna or fortunatus, which means "fortunate" or "rich." When Fortunato refers to his wife, he calls her Lady Fortunato hence, he himself is a nobleman, Lord Fortunato, Poe preferring to useĮnglish rather than French titles. Poe knew him from Hamilton's Count of Gramont (1811) and possibly other sources. A real Count of Montresor, Claude Bourdeille (1606-63), conspired to assassinate Cardinal Richelieu. 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 Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is a frequently anthologized short story and one of my favorites.The Edgar Allan Poe story "The Cask of Amontillado" is one of his finest. Review of The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.Books for Elementary and Middle School Students.Short Stories: Characters in Conflict by John Warriner.Collections and Anthologies for Middle School.
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