The Motive for Murder in "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) has never failed to puzzle its readers. The story is a confession of a man who committed a horrible crime half a century ago. Montresor lures Fortunato into the family vaults under the pretext that he needs Fortunato’s opinion of the newly acquired Amontillado wine. In a remote niche of the crypt, Montresor fetters Fortunato to the wall and then bricks him in. The reader is perplexed by a seeming absence of the motive for this crime. Unable to find a logical explanation of Montresor’s hatred for Fortunato, most commentators conclude that Montresor is insane. Such interpretation, however, seems to make certain details in the elaborate structure of the story unnecessary and this, in turn, goes against Poe’s approach to composition. In the essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” written in the same year as “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe demonstrates that there are no details in his works that appear due to accident or intuition, and that his work proceeds “to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (166). While such an approach to creative writing has earned Poe an antipathetic reputation of the first “technocrat of art” from Theodore Adorno (193), it would find support with Russian Formalists. The Formalists’ view of the form “as the totality of the work’s various components” and their interest in analyzing the form by identifying the functions of the text’s various components (Todorov 10-11) match Poe’s ideas about writing. Indeed, “The Cask of Amontillado” could be among the Formalists’ favorite texts, for the details in this story are like pieces of a mosaic, each of which serves the purpose of completing the whole. My hypothesis is that the story contains all the information necessary for finding an explanation for Montresor’s heinous deed. Although the subject matter of Poe’s story is a murder, “The Cask of Amontillado” is not a tale of detection, for there is no investigation of Montresor’s crime. 1 The criminal himself explains how he committed the murder. Despite this explanation, “The Cask of Amontillado” is a mystery, for at its heart lies an intriguing question: “Why did he do it?” This question is different from the “Who’s done

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