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

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