If we grant that Fortunato has enjoyed more luck in his business ventures than the narrator of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, we may view Montresor as the frustrated artist whose genius has been overlooked by the world, which has instead rewarded his unimaginative and less intellectually gifted rival with all of the success. This is part of a nineteenth-century preoccupation with murder as a ‘crime’, something that Thomas de Quincey, in his 1827 essay ‘ On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts’, had helped to popularise (Oscar Wilde, in his ‘ Pen, Pencil and Poison’, would re-popularise this notion at the end of the century). In this interpretation, Montresor’s crime is itself a work of art, which he describes to us with evident pride. This interpretation of the story cannot be proved through reference to the story alone, but it becomes more persuasive when we bear in mind Poe’s fondness for writing ‘revenge tales’ which enact his own desire to pour scorn on his literary enemies. ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ has been interpreted as a story about two very different kinds of artist: the lucky successful artist and the talented but overlooked genius. (Since fifty years have elapsed since Fortunato’s murder, we can assume his account is something akin to a deathbed confession.) Indeed, he seems to be proud of having pulled off the perfect crime, without ever having been caught and charged. Although it is ostensibly a confession of his crime, he informs us of the details of Fortunato’s murder, and how he laid the trap for his enemy, with a calm rationality that appears to be devoid of remorse. Whether this is his victim haunting him from beyond the grave, or a manifestation of the criminal’s guilty conscience, he is eventually overwhelmed by the incessant beating from beneath the floor until he confesses his crime.īut Montresor’s ‘confession’ is rather different.

So in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, for example, the murderer’s remorse is exemplified by the sound of his victim’s heart beating under the floorboards where he has buried the body. In many of Edgar Allan Poe’s other tales of murder and other crimes, the perpetrator is eventually forced to confront their crimes and come to terms with their guilt over what they have done.

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