Pathos In The Cask Of Amontillado

The disposition of Edgar Allan Poe, which is crucial to the development of a reader’s understanding, can be identified and interpreted in all of his texts. We see present his unnatural relation between the orders of things that are usually separate like rationality and madness. His representation of events which are uncanny, or melodramatically violent, and often deal with aberrant psychological states that get the reader and protagonists to question their senses. Poe’s use of pathos to develop his characters and the emotions of the readers are evidently critical to his stories as well. As we see in “The Cask of Amontillado” resentment is what drove our narrator to commit the cynical act of entombing his enemy alive then burning him. Emotions like fear, anger, and sadness are emotions that are also evident his other stories. In “The Cask of Amontillado” our phenomenological experience occurs right when the story begins as we see the story develops in the first-person point of view. Poe

knowingly puts us on the threshold of the conscious of the narrator and the reality of our thoughts. We our obliged to identify the use of the Gothic tropes like the flambeaux and the trowel so it is possible to enhance the phenomenological experience. Poe uses his erudition of the average person to evoke chilling terror and a sense of conscious questioning of one’s psychological state.
In “The Cask of Amontillado” the narrator is viewed in the text to be to a certain extent psychotic in the sense that to be able to carry out his plan of murdering Fortunato he had to have everything pin- pointed exactly. This includes knowing how to persuade Fortunato to accompany him to the catacombs, to knowing how to make sure the servants leave the house without him telling them directly “These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned” (Poe 5). The insults perhaps were so great the Narrator grew to become cynical enough to think such a plan up. The narrator grew to dislike Fortunato so much that the idea of his death was what drove him to smile and carry on ‘my smile now was at the thought of his immolation” (Poe 3). The narrator assures us of his cold- heartedness when, in the end of the story, he states “my heart grew sick- on account of the dampness of the catacombs” (Poe 10). The narrator felt no remorse towards his actions. By stating this he breaks the barrier between the surface reality and the reality beneath the surface. The narrator clearly lives by the motto of his family, nemo me impune lacessit, no one insults me with impunity.
As the story develops it is evident Fortunato allows himself to be led to his death by his pride.

The narrator gives him many chances to go back and avoid his fate “Come...we will go back; your health is precious” (Poe 5).We see Fortunato feels he is compelled to defend his reputation on his connoisseurship in wine when he states “Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry” (Poe 4). However towards the end of the story it becomes abruptly clear that Fortunato cannot accept the sudden psychological state of the narrator and believes it is all a joke perhaps because of the narrator’s previous comments about him being an admired, respected, and beloved man. “Ha! Ha! Ha!-he! He!-a very good joke indeed- an excellent jest. We will have a rich laugh about it at the palazzo” (Poe 10). Throughout the story we see how Fortunato slowly develops from a “respected” man with a skill for wines to what he truly is an alcoholic who was to prideful to notice what his actions had led him

to.