The Cask Of Amontillado Chapter 1 Summary

When Louise Mallard is told of her husband’s death, her sister Josephine and her husband’s friend Richard make sure that she does not go into shock because they know that it can kill her. Louise cries before her friend and sister, before going to her room alone to grieve. After sitting in the room and going back and forth from crying to being still, she realizes that although her husband cared for her deeply, now that he was dead she would be free of him and the authority he held over her. This brings her to become excited about her new future of freedom. She wonders of all the things she will be able to do without her husband and she loses almost all the sadness that overwhelmed her moments before. She embraces this new happiness alone before leaving her room to be with
Josephine and Richard.
Montresor’s plan to get revenge on Fortunato for insulting him is to lure him to his home by telling him of the fine wine that he has in his vaults.
Fortunato, being the wine finatic that he is, agrees to go to Montresor’s home to see the Amontillado that Montresor speaks of. On the journey to the end of the vault where the wine is, Montresor continues to provide Fortunato with wine, claiming that it will soothe the cough that Fortunato has accrued. By the time they reach the vault with the “Amontillado”, Fortunato is too drunk to realize what is happening to him. Montresor chains him to the wall and begins to build a wall around him, trapping Fortunato inside. This is the revenge that he had planned to take out on Fortunato, however, when Fortunato started to sober up and realized what was happening he attempted to ask if what was happening was a joke, and with no answer, he ultimately became silent. Montresor tried to get satisfaction out of his suffering, but with Fortunato being silent, he was unable to feed off what he thought was the best revenge, hearing Fortunato suffer. He ultimately did get the revenge on Fortunato, even though it was not as satisfactory as he would have liked it to
be.
I think that Emily Grierson was probably clinically insane. I have sympathy for her because I do not think that she thought killing her husband was a bad thing to do. Her father did not treat her with great kindness, even refusing suitors for her, which caused her to be single at the age of thirty. In the time period that Emily was living in, there was not much for her to do to help cope with the rejection of her father’s approval. She was forced to accept what he had chosen for her, which is why she might have made her own decision to kill her husband.