Monteresor in the main hero and narrator of the story “The cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. He is the murderer who confesses of his own crime fifty years after it happened. The motif of his narration can be treated ambiguously. On the one side, it looks like he is just bragging about the fact that he has managed to escape the responsibility and stay away from the police for so many years. On the other side, a reader can assume that this story is a kind of confession of the person who had lived all his live with that awful sin.
However, it seems that Edgar Allan Poe again wanted to create a story about cold-blooded murderer to force people think and make own judgments depending on their moral values. Monteresor is not depicted as a real character; the main hero creates his image with his own story. The reader does not know this appearance, personal information, the traits of his character, etc. He is absolutely unknowable and alien, though seems to be still alive. E. Poe created the feeling that the main hero tells the story in real time. Monteresor was granted the power to show oneself as he would like to be shown, and he did. He wants to be perceived as a cruel killer ready to murder his friend only because he “laughed at his proud name” (Poe 68).
Monteresor is very often called unreliable narrator, namely the narrator who is difficult to trust as he has some mental disorders. “The cask of Amontillado” is the classical sample of E. Poe’s creativity, who very often used unreliable narrators in his stories, so it is easy to state that he created such type of the main hero deliberately. Moreover, it is quite clear that a person who can plaster his friend into the cask and leave him dying is mentally insane. For that reason, one cannot rely on his story. An interesting point is that at the beginning of the story the reader does not suspect that Monteresor can be lying. The hero is just telling a story about the conflict with his friend, and until the last passages it is hard to believe that he can kill a person for such a nonsense. This device works only if the reader originally believed the narrator to be a faithful truth teller (Crossen).
The main hero is a good psychologist. He can easily understand the behavior pattern of Fortunado and make him enter the cask. He is a smart and malevolent person, who honors only the name of his old family, but surprisingly not his own name. If Monteresor thought about the consequences of that murder and about the harm, they may have caused to the glory of his name, he would not kill his friend. That is why it is possible to conclude that the main hero lives with his past and symbolically he is also captured in the old dark cask with the bones of this family. He does not understand that the only way to be respected is to be honored for what you have done in your own life. Monteresor is a slave of his own beliefs and social opinion.
The role of Monteresor as a main hero is to show the reader the dark side of narrow-mindedness and to reveal the psychology of murder. E. Poe tried to depict difficult and confusing nature of the criminal, who wants to hide his crime from the police, but at the same time takes pleasure in retelling it to the public. It shows the contradicting nature of human created of contrasts. The reader can carry out the analysis of his own attitude to this type of a person based on the image of Monteresor. E. Poe wanted to show that there is nothing worse than being proud of the name and not deserving it. A person should live by who he is, but not by the name or glory of the ancestors.
Works cited
Crossen, Cynthia. “The allure of unreliable narrators” The Wall Street Journal. 23 May. 2011. Web. 16 March. 2016.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The cask of Amontillado” American English. Web. 16 March. 2016.
