A Different Perspective
The Secret Person of Interest
“The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allen Poe, where the main conflict of the story is one of vengeance with conditions. The narrator and main character Montresor is re-telling the story of his darkest deed. Montresor had had “1000 injuries” done to him by his “friend” Fortunato. The main gripe Montresor has with Fortunato is that he insulted him in front of a court of people that Fortunato wanted to make laugh, he was at a festival wearing a jester outfit, being a part of the event. I will focus on the Characters of the story and how they help the overall theme of vengeance with conditions. My thesis is that there is a third character in “The Cask of Amontillado” someone so subtly talked about that there are only two times in the whole story where the third character is even mentioned and only one of those times is he directly talked to.
The first time Montresor talks about the third character is in the first paragraph, he states “You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose,…”. Now when I first, second, and even the 30th time read this I assumed he was confessing the act of “The Cask” to a loved one like a wife or a sibling, but then I re-read the entire story again and throughout the paragraphs Montresor isn’t telling this story in general, he is specifically re-telling someone of his actions in the wine cellar. But at the end of the day a wife or sibling still has a moral obligation to tell others of the deed Montesor had committed on Fortunato, it was murder after all. But then I started to take into account the setting in which “The Cask of Amontillado” is set in, the late 1700s or early 1800s due to the fact that Montresor is wearing a “Roliquiare’’, a popular fashion piece in Italy during that time.
But if you stop there you aren’t taking any of the other facts into account. Like the other reference to the third character, this time at the end of the story, all the way down in the last paragraph I noticed he said “In pace requiescat!” which means “may you rest in peace” in Italian. But for a revenge plan that he has been planning for so long, for a person he claims he so deeply hates because and I quote “It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.”. For those who don’t know the meaning of that word, “Immolation” it means the destruction or killing of someone or something by way of burning by fire. You have to ask yourself, why say “rest in peace” to someone you wanted to literally burn at the stake, why does he say it in the same paragraph that he says “ My heart grew sick-…” after the confirmation of the death of his ‘friend’ Fortunato? See, he follows that line with the description of the wine cellar they were in “…on account of the dampness of the catacombs. I hastened to make an end of my labor.” Now if you read that too fast all it will be is the description of the catacomb he is in, but if you understand from the first clue at the beginning Montresor was not only talking to someone who knows the nature of the human soul but is confessing to that person about it. So with this context of sadness of the soul instead of physical pain to the body, it changes from a fast throwaway line of a description of the catacombs to the key as to who he is talking to, someone of the time period, who was not morally obligated to tell anyone, someone who knew regular human behavior and has experience dealing with it in that time period, and someone who is duty bound to not tell of his experience, successfully keeping his rules for revenge intact while also lifting the weight of his deed off of his soul. The only profession where these two parameters can be met is a fucking priest at a church because they know human nature, they can’t talk about what he did to anyone keeping him safe, and he can go and talk to them without causing suspicion because he is “just being a good Christian after all” aka following the folkways of his time period.
