The Cask of Amontillado Criticism by Cynthia Bily

Criticism

Cynthia Bily

Bily teaches English at Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan. In the following essay, she discusses the concepts of duplicity and doubling in ‘The Cask of Amontillado.”

“When one of Poe’s protagonists is wrestling with guilt, Hoffman explains, he sometimes ‘doubles his character and then arranges for one self to murder the other by burying him alive.’”

When Montresor decides that it is time to seek revenge for the “thousand injuries of Fortunato,” he does not make his feelings known. Although the honor code of the day might have called for a public challenge and a duel to the death, Montresor decides that he will not give “utterance to a threat.” Instead, while he waits for his opportunity, he behaves as though nothing is wrong: “It must be understood, that neither by word not 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.”

The word for Montresor’s behavior is “duplicitous.” It means that he is concealing his true motives and feelings beneath a deceptive exterior, that he is being two-faced. The word, of course, is related to “duplicate” and “duplex” and “double.” Montresor is behaving as his own opposite in his dealings with Fortunato. As the story progresses, however, it will become clearer that the other side of Montresor’s personality is not the smiling face he offers to Fortunato.

The story is filled with twins and opposites. The characters’ names, for example, bounce off each other, two echoes of the same idea. The name “Montresor” carries the idea of “treasure,” and “Fortunato” implies “fortune.” Two sides of the same coin, as it were. As the two men walk along the damp passageway, Montresor offers Fortunato two bottles of wine: Medoc, thought to have medicinal powers and promising to “defend us from the damps,” and De Grave, a wine whose name means “of the grave.” Just afterward, Fortunato makes a “gesticulation,” a secret gesture that demonstrates that he is a member of the Free and Accepted Masons, a secret fraternal order. In a scene that calls to mind nothing so much as Harpo Marx, Montresor produces a trowel from beneath his cloak, a sign that he, too, is a mason but of a different, deadly variety.

As the story opens, the men seem more different than alike. Montresor is cold, calculating, sober in every sense of the word. Fortunato greets him with “excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much.” Montresor wears a black mask, a short cloak and a rapier or sword, the very image of a distinguished gentleman. Fortunato, on the other hand, is dressed for “the supreme madness of the carnival season” in motley, the jester’s costume, complete with “tight-fitting parti-striped” clothing and a pointed cap with jingling bells at the tip. A drunken man with bells on his hat seems no match for Montresor, and it is hard to imagine Fortunato as “a man to be respected, and even feared” as he sways and staggers and fixates on the prospect of tasting more wine, the Amontillado.

Montresor continues his duplicity. He suggests that Luchesi could taste the wine instead of Fortunato, knowing that the suggestion will make Fortunato all the more eager to taste it himself. He repeatedly fusses over Fortunato’s health, proposing that they ought to turn back before the foul air makes his “friend” ill, when in fact he intends that Fortunato will never leave the catacombs alive. He emphasizes the ways in which they are opposites: “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter.”

Up to this point, even the conversation between the two establishes their different purposes. Looking over Montresor’s shoulders, the reader is aware of the irony when Fortunato says, “the cough is a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough” and Montresor replies, “True true.” Although Montresor’s plans have not yet been revealed, the reader knows with growing certainty that Fortunato will die. When Montresor and Fortunato share the therapeutic Medoc, Fortunato drinks “to the buried that repose around us,” and Montresor replies, “And I to your long life.”

From this point, things begin to change. Montresor’s determination to hold himself as unlike Fortunato slips, and he becomes more like him with every step, as the wine works its effect on both of them. “The wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc.” Previously, Fortunato has twice taken Montresor’s arm to steady himself as they walk. Now Montresor returns the gesture, “I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow.” When they reach the end of the final passageway, Poe presents a flurry of twos: two men in “the interval between two of the colossal supports” confronted with “two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet.” But as soon as Montresor fastens the padlock on the chain around Fortunato’s waist, the two are one.

Now, when Fortunato speaks, Montresor echoes his words. “The Amontillado!” Fortunato cries out, and Montresor replies, “True, the Amontillado.

” “Let us be gone,” says Fortunato, and Montresor replies, “Yes, let us be gone.” “For the love of God, Montresor!” cries Fortunato. “Yes,” Montresor says, “for the love of God!” Montresor becomes unnerved when Fortunato abruptly stops the game, when he refuses to speak any more. “I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient.” Why does Montresor wish Fortunato to keep speaking? Why does he shine his torch inside, hoping for a response? It is when he gets no answer except “only a jingling of the bells” that his heart grows sick.

The most chilling moment in the story happens, surely not coincidentally, at midnight (the time when the two hands of the clock are in one place), when the two men transcend human speech and communicate their oneness in another voice. Fortunato begins it with “a succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form.” At first, Montresor does not know how to respond to this communication. He moves “violently back,” hesitates, trembles. He waves his rapier around, fearing that Fortunato is coming for him, but is reassured at the touch of the solid walls. “The thought of an instant,” the realization that Fortunato is tightly bound, makes Montresor feel safe, and his reaction is dramatic and bizarre: “I reapproached the wall. I replied to the yells of him who clamored. I reechoed I aided I surpassed them in volume and in strength.” It is difficult to imagine the sounds produced by two men, enemies and opposites, hundreds of feet underground howling at midnight in a damp stone chamber. Surely the volume and the echoes would not yield two distinct voices, but one grotesque sound. For that moment, the two are one.

After the wall is completed, fifty years pass before Montresor tells the story. What has he learned in the intervening years? Has he felt remorse? For most of the story, Montresor’s language is clear and direct, although the formality of nineteenth-century speech may seem difficult to modern readers. In the story’s opening paragraph, told fifty years after the crime, the language is uncharacteristically convoluted and opaque: “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.” Most readers pause over these lines, stopping to sort out the redresser and the redressed from the redressee. If the roles are confusing, it is because in Montresor’s mind the lines between avenger and victim are no longer distinct. When Montresor speaks the story’s last line, “In pace requiescat” (“rest in peace”), is he speaking of Fortunato or of himself? By the end of the story, the two are so connected that it is all the same.

If Poe did intend the two men to be read as twins or doubles, what can he have meant by it? Critics have been pondering this question for over a century and a half. Daniel Hoffman, in Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, explores Poe’s theme of “the fate of the man haunted by his own double, his anima, his weird.” When one of Poe’s protagonists is wrestling with guilt, Hoffman explains, he sometimes “doubles his character and then arranges for one self to murder the other by burying him alive. In repeatedly telling stories of murderous doubles (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “William Wilson,” and others), Poe was attempting to deal with his own demons, his own repressed guilt. Poe biographer William Bittner claims that Montresor and Fortunato “are two sides of the same man Edgar Poe as he saw himself while drinking.” For Betina Knapp, author of a study titled Edgar Allan Poe, the “shadow figure emerges as a personification of the narrator’s hostile feelings and thoughts, symbolizing the repressed instincts of the personality.” In his criticism and his daily life, Poe “felt himself striking back, at those forces in society or particularly individuals who might have wronged him.”

Characters encountering and slaying their doubles are found throughout history and throughout the world, from Aristotle’s story of a man who could not go out without meeting his “double” to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Luke Skywalker meeting Darth Vader in Yoda’s cave, killing him, and seeing that the face beneath the mask is his own. The Germans have a name for the phenomenon doppelganger, meaning “double walker” and psy-chiatrists have recorded thousands of accounts of people who believe that they have actually encountered mirror images of themselves, usually late at night. Like other archetypal images, the encounter with the double, the other side of oneself, is a powerful image that has attracted and repelled for centuries. Poe anticipated modern psychology with its id, ego and superego by showing through his stories that the monsters outside are nothing compared to the monsters we carry within us.

Source: Cynthia Bily, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.