Essay Comparing The Cask Of Amontillado And Pancakes

Two stories; one sinister, and one more lighthearted. One dealing with life and death, and the other addresses perfectionism. One grim and sadistic, and one gentle and joyous. The two stories being compared here are “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe and “Pancakes” by Joan Bauer. Written over one-hundred years apart, the two short stories have stark differences, as could be expected. But upon examination, they also have some striking similarities — even more than observable differences. First, both use the narrative voice to set an appropriate mood for the setting. We learn everything we know from the narrators, and the descriptions of the environment around them is the clearest picture we can get of the scene. Second, both literary

In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montressor graphically describes the scene inside the catacombs with sensory imagery. Using phrases like “We had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs.” and “Pass your hand over the wall; you cannot help feeling the niter. Indeed it is very damp,” sends a chill down the readers back. By incorporating these little pieces of descriptive dialogue, Poe succeeds in making the scene even more grim than it already was. He invokes an image into the readers mind of a damp, cold maze of bones. This use of imagery is also seen in “Pancakes.” At the end of the story there is a clear example of this as Jill states, “Hugo was speed-pouring boysenberry syrup, spilling everywhere.” He imagine a scene of a careless young boy recklessly pouring an aromatic, thick red syrup — and all of this came from a few words. This is the power of sensory imagery, and this is the reason both narrators used the first-person narrative voice. In combination with how readers come to view the narrator (innocent, sadistic, creepy, biased, etc), the sensory imagery gives us a sense of the setting and how it affects the active