Montresor's Madness

The madness of Poe's narrators illustrates the potential of the mind to distort reality, and causes the reader to question the narrator's reliability. “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” are all told in the first-person point-of-view. The narrators of these stories are unreliable due to their mental instability, and therefore the validity of the narratives that they offer must be questioned. Montresor, the narrator of “The Cask of Amontillado,” feels justified in murdering Fortunato, and does not recognize the irrationality of his actions. Similarly, the narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” begin their tales by insisting upon their own sanity before recounting events which are anything but sane. Each of these narrators, for one reason or
His motive for killing Fortunato is pure revenge for an unspecified “insult.” (1108) As Montresor progresses in relaying the events, he appears to become more and more unhinged, all the while failing to recognize how little rationale there is behind his behavior. A sane person would not commit murder over a careless insult. The audience must question everything that Montresor says, not only because of his mental state, but also because he is recounting the events fifty years after the fact. It is impossible to determine what parts of the story are real, and what parts are imagined, or merely exaggerated. There is a question of what, precisely, the “insult” was that led Montresor to commit an act so vile. (1108) Not only did he take a man's life, he did it in one of the most inconceivably horrific ways imaginable: by entombing him in a crypt. When Montresor meets Fortunato, during the “supreme madness of the carnival season,” he pretends to be his dear friend, and tantalizes him with the promise of a cask of Amontillado. He plays upon Fortunato's pride in his “connoisseurship in wine” in order to lure him down to his