SOURCE: "Poe's 'Cask of Amontillado': A Tale of Effect," in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, edited by Ernst Fraenkel, Hans Galinsky, Dietrich Gerhard, Ursula Brumm, and H. J. Lang, Carl Winter, 1968, pp. 134-42.

In the following essay, Freehafer provides an overview of scholarship on Poe's tale.

According to the usual view, Edgar Allan Poe's "Cask of Amontillado" is a masterful tale of an implacable revenge for an unspecified insult, marked by economy of words and singleness of effect. Yet no part of this customary estimate of the story has gone unchallenged. Whereas one writer contends that it is not a tale of revenge at all, but a manifestation of "Poe's theory of perversity,"¹ others see in it an embodiment of the duello or a compulsive confession of a remorseful murderer. Other commentators have argued that Montresor's revenge is inspired by Fortunato's Freemasonry, or Poe's literary quarrels. Furthermore, the story...