McClinchy 1 Chuckie McClinchy Mrs. Tieman English 12/Dual Credit 25 February 2014 Cask of Amontillado vs.

Once upon a Time Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Cask of Amontillado, a morbid tale of revenge on a completely unaware man. Nadine Gordimers Once upon a Time is a tale of happily ever after gone awry. Both dark stories, they have similar progression, motivations, and endings, but even in those, these tales show how different they really are . The Cask of Amontillado begins at a carnival and proceeds to journey deep underground through the Montresor family catacombs while the bulk of Once upon a Time takes place in the unnamed familys home. Each story begins with a sense of freedom; Fortunato is jovial with drink at the carnival and the unnamed family is living happily ever after. However, confinement and discomfort quickly take hold of these stories. With malicious intentions, Montresor leads Fortunato through underground tunnels that only get deeper, darker, and colder. The family of Once upon a Time creates their own prison, installing a security gate and surrounding themselves with huge walls topped

McClinchy 2 with barbed wire. As the characters cramp themselves more and more, they come closer and closer to the deaths which end each story. Fear is the common reason for this progression through the setting and through each story for the main characters. The unnamed narrator of Once upon a Time is awoken by a bump in the night and lets her imagination run wild as to what the source was. She projects this fear of the unknown onto the family of Once upon a Time who also fears the unknown. They install a security gate, burglar bars, and a huge wall topped with razor wire to protect themselves from potential threats. Montresor handles his fear quite differently. He fears further insults from Fortunato and/or these insults ruining his reputation. His family motto, Nemo me impune lacessit, or No one attacks me with impunity, leads him to believe that he must eliminate his attacker with impunity. So the only logical conclusion from that course of events is that Fortunato must be buried alive deep underground. These fears are the reasoning behind either story happening, but they are dealt with entirely differently.

Family pressures is also a major driving force to each plot. The wise old witch of Once upon a Time is constantly egging her family on, even helping to pay for their new security installments. She warns them early in the story not to trust outsiders and gives

McClinchy 3 the child a book of fairy tales. Trying to emulate the hero of the story, the child inadvertently kills himself in the very security installments meant to protect him, which were paid for by his grandmother, the wise old witch. While not actually featured in the story, Montresors family indirectly tells him that he must kill Fortunato through the aforementioned family motto. He believes that Fortunato has verbally attacked him and Montresor would not let his attacker go unpunished. In addition to punishing Fortunato, Montresor knew that he must go unpunished. This is why he leads Fortunato so far into the catacombs, deep underground, where no one would ever know of his crime. While each death was entirely different in motive, they each had their similarities. Fortunato was a victim of cold, calculated murder at the hands of Montresor while the child was a victim of youthful innocence and a wild imagination. Fortunato died by the hand of a cold calculated murder; having obviously premeditated the murder, Montresor prepared the brick and mortar ahead of time. Tragically, the boy was just playing makebelieve, pretending to be the hero from his book climbing through the thorns. However, each of these deaths was entirely avoidable. Given at least four separate opportunities to back out of the quest for Amontillado, Fortunato refused each and every one and

McClinchy 4 decided to march on. While he obviously did not know why Montresor was doing this, he was ill and it would have been in his best interest to go home anyway. Looking at Once upon a Time, the small boys death was avoidable in a couple ways. On one hand, his parents did not need to install huge walls topped with razor wire. On the other hand, knowing that razor wire was clearly a hazard to small child, they could have supervised him more closely to keep him safe. After all, he had already played with the security gate earlier in the story; perhaps he just thought of all of the security as big new toys. These stories are similar in their progression from free to captive, their motivation from both fear and family, and of course they each have gruesome endings . While not entirely alike, these two pieces have striking similarities, but it is within these similarities that the real differences are revealed. As they say, the devils in the details.