Cask of Amontillado Response

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begins to fade. The stage of denial starts to fade as he starts screaming for help, only to be answered by Montresor’s screams, mimicking him. Fortunato grows quiet as the last few bricks are placed, maybe he has given up, or maybe consumed too much wine at the party and then wandering into the catacombs. The last thing that Montresor hears is a small jingle of bells from Fortunato’s party costume, and with that he takes his torch and heads for the surface, leaving Fortunado to be buried alive.

This story was really interesting to reflect on, and I am glad to have chosen it for my first story reading response. Edgar Allan Poe has always been one of my favorite writers, due to his acknowledgment that a lot of aspects are life are truly dark, and that does not make them not worth writing about, but quite the opposite. All too often we take the dark things in life for granted, without the existence of the dark, then how do we know light when we see it? Poe lived what some may say a depressing life, but in return we get to see the contrast between his world and ours, and learn that at times, we may feel a lot of the same emotions that he did. The Cask of Amontillado in particular fascinated me in terms of human psychology, how one man turned another’s own willpower and self confidence into a tool of his own death, all for a insult that we are not aware of. In the end I asked myself, “did Fortunato really deserve this?” and then realized it, this story was not about whether our friend Fortunato deserved this horrific fate, but about personal justice. There were no gods in this story, no heaven or hell, there was no right or wrong, it was one man deciding to take his own form of vengeance on another man in one of the most horrific ways possible, a true look into human emotion and deceit. I think a lot of the time as the human race we forget how violent and prehistoric we can really be at times if left to our own emotions, and when left with our own sense of justice, we have no judge or juror, but only the choices we choose to make.

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