CAST OF AMONTILLADO

Post-modernism

The story is set in a nameless Italian city in an unspecified year and 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. The video quality itself is bad but that's to be expected from such an
old recording. This is a great interpretation of the short story. However, the story
said that Montresor burned Fortunato. In the movie, I did not see any burning.
Overall, I really enjoyed the film.

MARXISM

The Cask of Amontillado” is a story of revenge, but it’s more than just one man
seeking justice against another. It is a representation of Poe’s personal life
experiences with the upper-class as well as a symbol of the nobility versus the
increasingly important lower classes. Whenever a major power begins losing
influence, there’s always backlash and that’s what Montresor represented. In the
end, Montresor represents the dying nobility in the world and how strongly they
would fight to keep the lower classes from rising in status; however, like the scene
in the catacombs where Fortunato and Montresor switch places, the lower classes
will eventually take the place of the nobility.
 THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Post-modernism

The first-person narration, in which the “I” remains unnamed, causes the reader to
identify with the protagonist. The obvious disadvantage of the use of the first
person, the knowledge from the outset that he manage to escape because he has
lived to tell his story overcome by Poe’s ability to create such tension and illogical
fear that one forgets this fact. The protagonist’s dread is shared by the audience, for
both are ignorant of the character’s environment and his ultimate fate. Therefore,
suspense is maintained, for the reader and the narrator discover each detail
simultaneously. As each new fact is revealed, there is a temporary feeling of relief,
which is destroyed as new, more awful terrors become known. This alternation of
relief and renewed terror ultimately causes the reader to doubt that any escape is
possible, despite the fact that, logically, the narrator must survive in order to write
his account. The tale ends with the unexpected deliverance of the narrator from the
scene of terror. On the literal level, he is liberated by the enemies of the
Inquisition, but the real story is one of the minds saved from annihilation or
madness.

MARXISM

The character’s swoons and exhausted sleep exacerbate the confusion, for they
cause gaps in the reader’s knowledge about reality. After each period of
unconsciousness, something in the environment has been changed, so that one
fears these so-called respites. According to the writer’s portraiture is masterful as
he evokes, the sensations of losing and regaining consciousness. Especially
realistic is his description of the mental state of the narrator as he is being
sentenced: The condemned man focuses on unimportant images. The curtains; the
candles, which become phantasmagoric; the thin, white lips of the judges, which
move but emit no comprehensible sound: “And then, all at once, there came a most
deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had
touched the wire of a galvanic battery.” This attention to detailed accounts of
sensations, smells, sounds, thirst, and hunger makes the narration credible and even
real for the reader. In addition, the writer of the account stresses that this is unlike
fiction: “Such a supposition [that I was dead], notwithstanding what we read in
fiction, is altogether inconsistent with real existence.”After all the foiled, character-
generated escapes, the final rescue is anticlimactic but welcome nevertheless. This
use of “deus ex machine”, the resolution of the problem by a force exterior to the
action of the story, is rather surprising because it is used infrequently in Poe’s
stories. Its use is justifiable, however, for the story is historically based.