The Cask of Amontillado
"The Cask of Amontillado" (sometimes spelled "The Casque of Amontillado" [a.mon.ti.ˈʝa.ðo]) is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe, first published in the November 1846 issue of Godey's Lady's Book. The story, set in an unnamed Italian city at carnival time in an unspecified year, is about a man taking fatal revenge on a friend who, he believes, has insulted him. Like several of Poe's stories, and in keeping with the 19th-century fascination with the subject, the narrative revolves around a person being buried alive – in this case, by immurement. As in "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart", Poe conveys the story from the murderer's perspective.
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- The Cask of Amontillado is great for that. And the classic poem The Raven describes existential dread so well.
I found with King the scarier aspects were the more mundane and psychological parts of his writing. I also found in some cases the adaptations to be better in some ways -- The Shawshank Redemption adaptation is great. And the poem in the TV adaptation of The Tommy Knockers felt more impactful than the one in the book.
- For a couple of different reasons.
The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.
If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.
This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.
Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.
- I was introduced to Poe via "The Cask of Amontillado". After that, I binge-watched The Fall of the House of Usher when it released, which is a mash-up of a lot of Poe's stories (the show didn't have the subtlety of the original work, but was a lot of fun). Now I'm reading all his short stories.
His work is really cool, and I wish I read him earlier.
- LOL. I think a lot of people look at something like this and think "I could do this" because, very plainly, they know that they could. I don't think there are a lot of people who read A Confederacy of Dunces or The Cask of Amontillado or The Lottery or The Trial and feel like they could do it, because, very plainly, they realize that they cannot.
- "Before his death in 1849 at age 40, Poe largely created the modern short story, while also inventing or perfecting half the genres represented on the bestseller list, including the mystery ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold-Bug"), science fiction ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"), psychological suspense ("The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amontillado") and, of course, gothic horror ("The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," the incomparable "Ligeia")."
I love Poe, but whether he can be credited with inventing these genres is highly debatable.
On the origin of the mystery tale, Poe published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in 1841, and "The Gold-Bug" in 1843.
In 1819 ETA Hoffmann wrote "Mademoiselle de Scuderi".
To my knowledge, it was Hoffmann's work, written decades before Poe's, that was the prototypical detective story (featuring a female detective even!).
On the origin of the Gothic, Poe published "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839, "The Masque of the Red Death" in 1842, and "Ligeia" in 1838.
By then, the Gothic genre was well under way, with Horace Walpole having published the classic The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Ann Radclife (the mother of the Gothic) had published The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794 and it was already parodied by Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in 1817, long before Poe even started writing any of his Gothic fiction.
Science fiction has a very long history, and depending on how you define it could go back at least to the 2nd Century AD, with Lucian's A True Story (featuring travel to outer space, encounters with aliens, and interplanetary warfare), but if you didn't accept that as "true science fiction" there are plenty of other candidates which predate Poe, such as parts of the Arabian Nights (well over a thousand years old by the time Poe started writing), Gulliver's Travels (1726), Voltaire's Micromegas (1752), and of course Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).
- If they were annotating Opera Librettas
My tastes are pretty middlebrow and all I could think to search for was Non piu andrai, which I couldn't find, but as far as poetry goes they've got works like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Ode to a Grecian Urn, and for literature they've got Joyce's amazing short story (and set at Christmastime) The Dead, The Cask of Amontillado, and with annotations by the founder Mahbod, War and Peace (he also says one of his favorite books is Nicholas Nickleby, which is not really an obvious choice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo#t=1018).
