The Cask of Amontillado

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” the main character, Montresor, leads his enemy, Fortunato, into his catacombs, and there buries him alive by bricking him up in a niche in the wall; Poe gives no actual reason for this except to say that Montresor has been “insulted” in some way. In his Science Fiction work “Usher II,” Ray Bradbury adopts many of Poe’s works in creating his story—including pieces from “TCoA.” What separates Bradbury’s work from other authors who borrow works and re-imagine them (Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, Geraldine Brooks’s March, and Peter Carrey’s Jack Maggs, for instance), is that “Usher II,” in its imaginative way, is trying to be one with its predecessor. Bradbury seeks to retain Poe’s love of the double and the secretive (Gothic mentalities where the reader is meant to be a bit uncertain about what they’re reading and what’s going on) while adding, most notably regarding “TCoA,” the things Poe never had much care for: a beginning, an end, and reason—thus making “Usher II” not only an homage to Poe’s work, but a companion piece whose beating heart lies within the original work.

Poe, according to Professor Epstein of the Queens College English Department, wrote for the climax, got you there, and then left; examples of this can be found in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where Poe cuts out right before the cops are about to slap the chains on the narrators, and, as will be illustrated below, in “TCoA.” In “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe writes, regarding the structure of his stories, “It is only with the denouement [the final revelation showing the outcome, or untying, of the plot] constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by ma...

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...has taken Poe’s “TCoA” whole, just as it is, and made it his own by tinkering at the edges, giving it a beginning, and, because the main character has knowable reasons for doing what he’s doing, a proper conclusion that doesn’t leave the reader feeling as if they’ve been pushed to the top of a mountain and then left there to get down themselves. In “Usher II,” Bradbury takes Poe’s masked figures and lifts them for the reader (if not for the characters, who need to die because they aren’t familiar with Poe). Bradbury hasn’t stolen Poe’s work, nor has he altered its effect; he has, instead, added his own sly creativity to a master storyteller’s work by expounding upon what was already there. I think that even Poe, who so valued originality, would have been amused by Bradbury’s retelling of his work. (Either that, or lead him down into some dark and dusty catacombs.)