Montresor's Perspective Essay

Words: 523
Pages: 3

Montresor’s Perspective “The Cask of Amontillado” is a short story told from the point of view of a murderer. The narrator, Montresor, explains his version of Fortunato’s murder and the motivation behind it. This is a macabre story when told by Montresor due to many factors. Altogether, the tense, auditor, voice, first person point of view, and unreliable narration of the story have a significant effect on the structure of the story. Montresor addresses the entirety of this story to an unstated person over fifty years after the murder. Therefore, the entire story is a flashback, so it must be in the past tense. The person to whom Montresor is speaking, the auditor, has no direct affiliation with the story. However, the story suggests that the auditor is a good friend of Montresor based on this direct quote from the story: “You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat” (Poe 108). Consequently, Montresor’s voice is different as …show more content…
Mainly, this is because Montresor’s description of the story seems to embellish it and attempt to make it special. Additionally, his use of language would also imply that he is more educated, and thus he uses more descriptive words to bring out the more twisted, morbid view of the story. This is most apparent due to his first person point of view which affects the entire context of the story. Throughout the story, Montresor speaks of his own actions as how he saw them. An example is: “As I said these words I buried myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken” (Poe 112). Due to the reader’s perspective of events being the same as the narrator, this story is told in the first person point of view. However, this point of view also exposes some of Montresor’s feelings and mental reasoning processes. From some of these details, the narrator reveals a significant fact about himself: he is