Amontillado; the wine of the assassin
...Amontillado he bought. Fortunato, who considers himself a true connoisseur of wine, insist that he is the one to determine the authenticity of the Amontillado. Montresor had counted on the strength and obstinate ness of Fortunato's vanity. "Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry. […] Come let us go. […] To your vaults" The cask of Amontillado turns out to be the weak spot of the respected and even feared Fortunato on which the evil plan of Montresor is carefully crafted. Although Montresor gives his victim many chances to escape, he knows his plan will not fail. A similar construction can be seen in Taylor Hackford's movie The Devil's Advocate in which the main character's downfall also lies in his vanity ("Vanity, my favourite sin"). The ease with which Fortunato buys Montresor's clever story makes him look like a fool, enforced by the image of him wearing a jester's costume. The envisioned 'cask' actually draws Fortunato into the 'casket' wherein he still lies (Kucik, 1996). Fortunato's taste for wine and the fact that he does not hold back drinking it, only simplifies the execution of the plan. In a broader perspective a theme that could be extracted from this story, related to the title, is dental hygiene and its scientific approach to which the Amontillado is a threat. In his memoirs Poe makes extensive reference to cleaning his teeth with rags and brushes and a powdered paste shown to him by a newspaper colleague (Wegrzynowski, 2002). In the story Fortunato embodies Poe’s appetite for sweetness (Amontillado) and Montresor stands for the superior dentist. Fortunato (fortune=hope) is characterized by irrational behaviour, yet again emphasized by the jester's costume. He stands for the dark, irrational side of man. The dentist symbolizes the supremacy of science. Irrational behaviour insults rationality and science at length will get her revenge, ‘with impunity’. Hope, an irrational psychic entity, will eventually lead us nowhere. Indications can...