The Cask of Amontillado

Objectives:

1)    Define symbol, foreshadow, irony

2)    Given a story identify characters with descriptions

3)    Given a story to be able to list it plot, conflict, point of view, antagonist, protagonist

 

 

NOTES

SYMBOL:  A person, place, an object, an image that represents a greater idea

EXAMPLES OF SYMBOLS in “THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO”

1)    How the characters are dressed

a)    Fortunato is dressed like a clown.  Ironically (dramatic) Poe is saying that Fortunato is a clown.  A drunken clown who is full of himself and unwittingly walks into a trap

b)    Montresor is dressed in black: black cape, black mask.  Symbolically he is diabolic, evil.  His revenge has purpose only to himself.

2)    The setting

The catabombs represent family (Montresor’s family), family pride, and death.  They might suggest that the murder of Fortunato was don out of family honor.  The insults might be that something happened a long time before the story takes place and involves the two families, or it might just be Fortunato acting above Montresor.  An insult that Montresor might take to represent one family above the other.

3)    The coat of arms.

ALLUSIONS:  The catacombs of Paris

IRONY:

Verbal Irony: Nearly everything Montresor says is verbal irony.

“I drink to your long life”—can you be more cruel.

Situational Irony: Fortunato doesn’t expect to be murdered.  Especially since he views himself above Montresor and he views Montresor in friendly terms.

Dramatic Irony:  The entire story is a monologue told from the point of view of Montresor.  What Montresor says is not what Poe means. 

THEMES:

When an obsessive man who feels he has been repeatedly insulted, or imagines that he has been repeatedly insulted, or who lies about being insulted as a cover-up, chooses revenge as a motive for murder, he may plan a cruel and unusual method to get rid of his for in order to escape punishment.

Pride can lead a man to do unthinkable things.  Pride can also cause us to be naïve and blind to the things surrounds a person, and in the most sever cases it can lead a person to his/her death.

No revenge is sweet.  Revenge is a gruesome and terrible thing.