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Unread 11-12-2005, 12:44 PM
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin's Avatar
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin Duncan Gillies MacLaurin is offline
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I don't know where to place this - maybe just on www.wikepedia.org

A synopsis of the two stories comes at the end.

* * *

“Dolan’s Cadillac” & “The Cask of Amontillado”

It appears that when Stephen King wrote “Dolan’s Cadillac” (1989) he was deeply inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). In both stories the main theme is revenge that results in murder, and the murders are very similar. Both Dolan and Fortunato are buried alive by the two narrators, Robinson and Montresor respectively. Dolan is buried in his Cadillac in a great hole in the desert, while Fortunato is chained to granite and walled up in a cellar. Both victims die a slow death, and towards the end both victims laugh insanely before making the same final plea for mercy:

“For the love of God!” he shrieked. “For the love of God, Robinson!”
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “For the love of God.”
- “Dolan’s Cadillac”, p.49, ll.8-9 Nightmares and Dreamscapes (Futura, 1993)

“For the love of God, Montresor!”
“Yes”, I said, “for the love of God!”
- “The Cask of Amontillado”

King’s imitation of the victim’s final words must be more than coincidence; King has surely employed them deliberately. But is this merely King acknowledging how similar the two stories are, or is “Dolan’s Cadillac” in fact a modern version of “The Cask of Amontillado”?

* * *

In his “Notes” on the text Steven King describes Robinson as “Elizabeth’s Poe-esque husband” (p.582), and he says that “Dolan’s Cadillac” is “a kind of archetypal horror story, with its mad narrator and its account of a premature burial in the desert”, which is a reference to another of Poe’s short stories, “The Premature Burial”. So here again King is acknowledging a debt to Poe - for those that are familiar with Poe at least. But he makes no direct reference to “The Cask of Amontillado”. On the contrary, he continues: “But this particular story really isn’t mine any more; it belongs to Dave King and Herb Yellin.” (p.583) By saying that the story belongs to his brother (who helped with the technical information) and an editor (whose request for a story prompted him to salvage this one), King is apparently denying that his debt to Poe is a significant one. But what about that final plea for mercy? Is it just a casual reference to “The Cask of Amontillado”, or is there a deeper connection that King is being coy about admitting? Perhaps King has written a modern version of “The Cask of Amontillado” and is waiting to see if anyone notices.

* * *

A closer analysis of “Dolan’s Cadillac” reveals many other similarities. King prefaces his novella with a proverb: “Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.” He calls this a “Spanish proverb”. What is interesting here is that the origins of this proverb are in fact unknown. And once we realise that Amontillado is a wine that comes from Montilla, a town in Southern Spain, then we can see this as a deliberate reference to Poe’s story. The two titles are also very similar inasmuch as Dolan’s armour-plated Cadillac is his pride and joy, but it is also his Achilles’ heel. It is what he puts his faith in, and therefore it is his weakness. Likewise, Fortunato has a passion for and is knowledgeable about good wine such as Amontillado, and it is this that proves to be his downfall.
“I must not only punish,” says Montresor at the outset, “but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.” Both avengers succeed on both these counts. This is not least due to them being quite prepared to wait until the right opportunity arises, if indeed it ever will arise. In “The Cask of Amontillado” Montresor has obviously hoped to encounter Fortunato that evening (he had made sure that his attendants would be absent), but he had hardly counted upon it: “I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.” In “Dolan’s Cadillac” Robinson admits: “I knew I might have to wait for years, and that someone else might get Dolan in the meantime. … Four loosely related vectors would have to come together, like a rare conjunction of the planets… Years maybe. Or maybe never.” (p.20, ll.3-9)
In both stories the main characters have the advantage of surprise, not least because they are unlikely villains. Montresor is a loyal servant: “It must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will.” And Robinson is “a balding third-grade teacher with myopia” (p.14, l.22).
Robinson has hallucinations of Dolan suddenly appearing even though he has been buried: “A sudden dark terror seized me – Dolan was behind me!” (p.46, l.33); “I opened one of the rear doors, observed Dolan crouched inside, and staggered back, screaming, one hand thrown up to shield my face.” (p.47, ll. 11-12); “I had this funny idea, you see, that he was going to rise up from the back seat, his skin charred to a cinnamon color and stretched over his skull like the skin of a mummy, his hair full of sand, his eyes and his Rolex watch glittering.” (p.51, ll.13-16) These echo a similar hallucination in “The Cask of Amontillado”: “A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated – I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me.”
The mindsets of the two narrators are very similar too. Both are seemingly crazed and become increasingly so, and the motives for revenge are personal in both stories. Robinson’s motive might seem more reasonable to us. He wants revenge because his wife has been brutally killed on Dolan’s orders so that she could not testify against him. Montresor, on the other hand, wants revenge because Fortunato has insulted him. This might seem rather unreasonable. Surely you do not kill a person just because he has insulted you? In olden days, however, especially in the aristocratic circles to which Montresor’s family traditionally belonged, honor was what was most important. We can see this from his family motto: “Nemo me impune lacessit”, which means, “No one insults me with impunity.” Even today we have the expression, “To add insult to injury”, which is used when something is beyond the pale and therefore something that should be redressed.
What Bakhtin calls carnival features – decrowning and role reversal, ambivalent laughter, intoxication, disguise, irony, and pairs and opposites – abound in both stories.
( See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. & trans. Caryl Emerson (Minnea¬polis, 1984), pp.122-7.)
The decrowning and role reversal element is central to both stories. Dolan is in the driving seat, so to speak, but Robinson brings him down to size. Fortunato is a cocky bully, and Montresor silences him for good. It is an archetypal story inasmuch as it is a version of the story of the battle between David and Goliath. This battle is uneven, but the underdog, the good guy, wins.
Ambivalent laughter is present throughout both stories, but more and more towards their conclusion. Fortunato tries to convince himself – and Montresor – that it is all “a very good joke indeed” when he is being “built” into the wall. Likewise, Dolan goes through the motions of trying to strike a deal with Robinson, while the latter begins to shovel sand onto Dolan’s car. Both victims die laughing insanely.
Fortunato is intoxicated and very easy to manipulate, and Montresor also drinks Medoc with him. Likewise, Dolan is presumably intoxicated, if not by alcohol then at least by his apparent invulnerability, while Robinson first “drank /Dolan’s/ poisoned water and was refreshed” (p.16, ll.18-19) and later takes strong painkillers to help him overcome his physical limitations.
In “The Cask of Amontillado” it is the time of the Carnival, and Fortunato is dressed as a clown, which is ironic in view of Montresor’s intention to make a fool out of him. Robinson also puts on disguises, first pretending to be a writer researching a story (with the added irony that Stephen King uncovered these facts while researching a story), and later pretending to be “Bill at Rennie’s Catering” (p.24, l.18) when he needs to know when Dolan will be arriving. In both King’s and Poe’s stories the protagonists seem normal to the people they encounter, but they are wearing masks. We, the readers, see their true identities because we are effectively inside their minds. With the exception of their victims, the rest of the world only sees a cool, calm Robinson and a stiff-upper-lipped Montresor, whereas we see them as crazed, vindictive murderers.
There is a lot of irony in both stories, not least in the fact that both victims are trapped by the objects they hold most dear. There is a lot of deliberate verbal irony in Poe’s story. Montresor is diabolical and unreliable. He can put up with a “thousand injuries” but not the slightest insult, and we suspect him of having a tendency to hold grudges and to exaggerate. He says one thing but means something else; he refers to Fortunato as his “friend” throughout. He expresses concern for Fortunato’s health, and he says several times that they should turn back so that his cough would not worsen. This is all part of his fiendish plan because he knows that Fortunato is so keen to taste the Amontillado that he will refuse to turn back. When Fortunato says that he will not die of a cough, Montresor says: “True… True”. He knows what Fortunato is going to die of. In “Dolan’s Cadillac” there are also instances of verbal irony, but it is often unintentional, for example at the end of the scene with his teacher friend:

‘Seventeen by five is pretty big for a scout vehicle.’ He laughed. ‘That’s damn near the size of a Lincoln Mark IV.’
I laughed, too. We laughed together. (p.23, bottom)

There is also more irony in the plot itself. For example here, where the pair laughing prefigure the climax where Dolan and Robinson laugh insanely together.
These two couples laughing are examples of what Bakhtin calls carnival pairs. Another striking instance of a carnival pair is Dolan’s grey Cadillac and the mint green Cadillac which Robinson only refrains from trapping at the last moment. But in contrast to the passengers in Dolan’s Cadillac, the green Cadillac contains “what looked like twelve Vegas chorines crowded in with one old boy who was wearing the biggest cowboy hat and the darkest Foster Grants I’d ever seen. One of the chorines mooned me as the green Cadillac went fishtailing onto the detour.” (p.38, ll.18-22) This turns the two Cadillacs into carnival opposites. Likewise, in “The Cask of Amontillado”, Montresor and Fortunato make up a carnival pair inasmuch as they are “friends” and walk together happily drinking, but at the same time we know they are carnival opposites. Montresor comes from an ancient aristocratic family that has fallen on hard times while Fortunato (a man of fortune) is nouveau riche, and their values are completely different. Similarly, Robinson comes from a good family that has gone down in the world; Robinson is poor. Dolan, on the other hand is rich, an upstart, a gangster. This is symbolized by the cars they drive and the watches they wear. The Cadillac is a modern, fast, expensive type of car as opposed to Robinson’s Buick, which has a history of more than 100 years. And as he is about to bury Dolan and his Cadillac Robinson says: “I have spent the last thirty-six hours digging the world’s longest grave, and now I’m going to bury you in your fucking Cadillac.” (p. 43, ll.15–17) Robinson is not only taking revenge on Dolan, but on everything he represents. Robinson’s great-grandfather’s chain watch is a symbol of traditional values, of ancient virtues like patience, justice, craftsmanship. Dolan’s expensive Rolex, on the other hand, symbolizes flashy, superficial materialism. Just as Fortunato is explicitly a Freemason, so Dolan is implicitly a member of the Mob.

* * *

The stories are written almost 150 years apart, “The Cask of Amontillado” in 1846 and “Dolan’s Cadillac” in 1989, and two main differences reflect this.
The first main difference is King’s inclusion of a woman. Just as Valerie Martin rewrote Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) with a woman in the main role in her novel, Mary Reilly (1990), so Steven King has given Robinson’s dead wife, Elizabeth, a major role, thus reflecting women’s more pronounced position in society. King uses Elizabeth’s voice to show Robinson’s gradual descent into madness and thereby give credibility to Robinson’s superhuman effort and his ultimate cold-blooded vengeance.
At first, Robinson plans to kill Dolan in collaboration with Elisabeth, and Elizabeth is only a voice in his head: “Inside, the voice that spoke for Elizabeth began to laugh. It was wild, mad laugher, but after a few moments I began to laugh along with it.” (p.15, ll.31-2) After a while, however, Elizabeth's voice becomes his prime motivation for taking revenge; her voice changes from being supportive into being commanding and peremptory. “l knew that he admired me and held me contempt at the same time, but l had no idea why he felt either way. And you don't need to care, darling, Elizabeth spoke up suddenly inside my mind. Dolan is your business. Remember Dolan.” (p.18, ll.35-8) This is where her voice goes from being an equal partner to a dominant force which insists that he takes revenge. From now on the voice that speaks for Elizabeth constantly reminds him what he needs to do on her behalf. We see this particularly while he is in great pain as he digs Dolan's grave. The only thing that keeps him going is Elizabeth’s voice: “Please, Elizabeth whispered back. Please. . . for me.” (p.31, l.25).
Later he no longer only imagines Elizabeth’s voice; now he actually believes that it is her: “But there is so little left to do! the voice wailed – it was no longer just the voice that spoke for Elizabeth, if it had ever been; it was Elizabeth. So little left, darling!” (p.33, ll.14-16) Here we see that Robinson is going mad and is therefore more likely to be able to commit superhuman deeds. From here Robinson argues less and less with Elisabeth and more and more with himself (e.g. pp.37-8). He is now two people, both himself and Elizabeth. When Robinson is on the point of trapping Dolan, the voice in his head is no longer attributed to Elizabeth at all (p.39). He has lost his sense of reality and has become insane. He has used the voice of Elizabeth as a vehicle to create the necessary conditions whereby he can single-mindedly exact his revenge.
Elizabeth was hardly such a demanding person as Robinson makes her out to be in his mind:

“She taught first-graders. They loved her, and I think that some of them may not have forgotten their love still, although they would be teenagers now. I loved her and love her still, certainly.” (p.11, ll.19-21)

But Robinson makes her out to be the way he needs her to be in order to finish the job he has set out to do. Even though Robinson claims that he is doing all of this out of love for Elizabeth, and that it is she who gives him the strength to fight Dolan and his men, we can see that it is a selfish kind of love; he is doing it to gain some peace of mind. He is using her as an excuse for his behavior. He can blame her for Dolan’s death just as he blames himself for her death. He ends up almost hating Elizabeth, or at least hating her voice in his mind. After he has taken his revenge Elizabeth falls silent, and he feels as though a great burden has been lifted off his shoulders.
It is unlikely that we would believe that this modern-day Montresor, Robinson, would be capable of killing Dolan if it was not for the device of Elizabeth’s voice constantly encouraging him. And it is a credible device. When Robinson loses his beloved Elizabeth, he has lost his reason for living. In late 20th-century America, a life without ‘love’ is like a book without words. Robinson can only keep on living if he is true to this modern kind of love. This ‘love’ is the engine of his life, as honor is the engine of Montresor’s.
The second main difference is a stylistic one. We are not surprised to note that Poe’s language is more formal than King’s, but a more striking difference is that Poe’s story is a mere 7 pages, while King’s novella is 40 pages long.
Poe wastes few words yet manages to include a wealth of effects and symbols. We are asked to accept without question the device that Montresor has prepared beforehand. Furthermore, Montresor makes no attempt to justify his actions beyond the opening two lines: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.” We hear no more about any external circumstances until the very end, where Poe elegantly reveals that Montresor’s account is almost certainly a kind of death-bed confession: “For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!” Montresor is distant and morbid. We are not asked to sympathize with him.
King, on the other hand, feels obliged to describe every step of Robinson’s grave-digging in the desert. We are given meticulous descriptions of his patience, and his mental and physical pain. We hear at length about his delusions, his paranoia, and his fears. King shows us Robinson going mad; he wants us to understand him and identify with him. Robinson’s narrative is far from being a death-bed confession. Its rationale is rather a manifestation of modern America’s penchant for self-analysis, gratuitous confession and exhibitionism.
Thus the great difference in the length of the two stories reflects the nature of the respective societies and the nature of the two writers.

* * *

The comparative analysis above demonstrates that “Dolan’s Cadillac” is, in fact, a modern version of “The Cask of Amontillado”. The basic plot line is the same, the psychological mindset of the narrator is the same, and the carnival tone in both stories is the same. Stephen King has merely added a credible motivation (Elizabeth) and modernized the narrative technique (the narrator wants to be understood). Our starting point – King’s imitation of the victim’s final words – also marks our journey’s end; it ought to be read as King’s signature to the fact that he has written a modern version of “The Cask of Amontillado”.

* * *
Postscript

In order to illuminate the archetypal nature of these two stories it is worthwhile to compare them to James Thurber’s short story, "The Catbird Seat". First published in the November 14, 1942, issue of the New Yorker, it also appeared in Thurber's 1945 collection, The Thurber Carnival. Since that time, the story has been published in dozens of anthologies for high school and college students, and Thurber has been called America's most important twentieth-century humorist.
The story chronicles a battle of wills between the fussy Erwin Martin, head of a filing department, and Ulgine Barrows, the firm's new efficiency expert who has ingratiated herself with their employer, Mr. Fitweiler, and threatens to bring change into Martin's well-ordered existence. With comic irony, Martin uses his reputation as a meek and pleasant man against the flashy Mrs. Barrows. The character of Martin is typical of what critics have called Thurber's "Little Man," a common working man who is baffled and beaten down by life in the United States in the twentieth century. Although it is Mrs. Barrows who seems strong and bold and powerful, it is Martin who wins in the end.
The title "The Catbird Seat" derives from the speech patterns of Red Barber, the radio announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team in the 1940s. Thurber, a devoted baseball fan, was among those who enjoyed the colorful expressions Barber sprinkled throughout his commentary. As Joey Hart, Martin's assistant explains, sitting "in the catbird seat" means being in an advantageous position.
Mrs. Barrows’ frequent use of such phrases irritates Martin immensely. He visits her apartment in order to kill her, but, finding no murder weapon at hand, he formulates a new plan. He has bought some cigarettes to create a red herring (he does not smoke), and when Barrows brings him the drink he has asked for (he does not drink), he realizes his charade is so unlikely that no one would be able to believe he perpetrated it. He then proceeds to call Mr. Fitweiler names, confides in Barrows that he is preparing to kill him with a bomb, and admits to being on heroin. His plan works. Barrows hastens to inform Fitweiler, but no one believes Barrows’ story. Martin is so plain as to be beyond suspicion. The upshot is that Barrows is diagnosed as having suffered a severe breakdown and is dismissed from the firm.
As in the other two stories, the main character, Martin has the advantage of surprise. He is but “the cautious, painstaking… head of the filing department”. And as Martin himself reasons while he is planning his initial scheme: “No one would see his hand, that is, unless he were caught in the act.”
As with Robinson and Montresor, Martin is willing to scrap his project if there is any risk of detection: “If he ran into anybody, he would simply have to place the rubbing-out of Ulgine Barrows in the inactive file forever.”
The carnival elements are very pronounced here too, with Martin and Barrows as extreme opposites. Martin’s improvisation not only provides the necessary element of poetic justice – Barrows is undone by the very means through which she achieved success, viz. ¬ingratiating herself with her employer – but it also adds an extra, bizarre carnival element inasmuch as Martin has to be exposed in order for him to succeed. Central to all three stories is carnivalistic decrowning and role-reversal: the demise of a bully.


From wikipedia.org:

'Dolan’s Cadillac' (1993) is a 40-page novella by Stephen King. It is collected in the short-story collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
Written from the point of view of a schoolteacher called Robinson (the hero), there is only one other main character, Dolan (the villain).
Robinson finds himself in a tragic set of circumstances. Dolan, a wealthy crime-boss, has had Robinson's wife murdered in order to prevent her from testifying against him, and Dolan has escaped justice. Over a seven-year period, however, Robinson has followed Dolan’s movements and brooded on revenge, and finally he has devised a scheme of retaliation. He intends to cover up a detour out in the desert, dig a huge ditch, and bury Dolan in his silver Cadillac. Dolan often takes the same road to Las Vegas, and, fuelled by hatred of Dolan and encouragement from his dead wife, whose voice he hears in his head, Robinson embarks on a series of elaborate preparations in order to put his plan into action. He does some intensive fitness training; he takes a summer job with a road paving crew so that he can learn how to operate the heavy equipment he needs to execute his plan; he finds out how big a Cadillac is and, on the pretext of writing a story, gets a friend, a math teacher, to work out the dimensions for the ditch, a ditch just wide enough to contain the car, but not so wide as to allow escape through the doors; and finally he prays for extensive road works on the road to Las Vegas to coincide with holidays for him, a national holiday making a 3-day weekend, and Dolan visiting Las Vegas. He is in luck, and after making a risky call to ascertain when exactly Dolan will be arriving in Las Vegas, he puts his plan into operation. He almost expires from sheer exhaustion, but the voice of his dead wife, Elizabeth, which has become more and more insistent in his mind, urges him on, and he finally succeeds in burying Dolan alive in his Cadillac. A sandstorm covers his traces. He recovers from his ordeal. Elizabeth’s voice falls silent.


"The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe set during the carnival season in 19th century Italy, in an ancient city of palazzi, and particularly in the secret vaults and catacombs below the narrator's home. The unreliable first person narrator, Montresor, bears a grudge — the reader never learns exactly why — against one of his "friends", ironically called Fortunato, and takes revenge on him. Montresor finds his friend inebriated, and dressed in carnival costume at dusk, and we learn that Montresor has made sure that the attendants he has will not be at home.
Montresor cleverly induces Fortunato to follow him into the catacombs to determine if his newly-acquired cask of Amontillado — a kind of Spanish sherry — is indeed authentic, and thus worth the price paid. They walk and talk, discussing Fortunato's health, the Montresor family motto (Nemo me impune lacessit — "No-one insults me with impunity") — and membership of the Freemasons (with a double meaning). The ominous atmosphere increases as they continue to the damp, nitrous air of the Montresor crypt.
Dumbfounded at the absence of the Amontillado at the end of their passage, Fortunato stands "stupidly bewildered" and Montresor takes advantage of the situation, suddenly chaining Fortunato to the wall in a small alcove roughly the size of a coffin. Montresor proceeds to seal the doorway with bricks as Fortunato slowly regains his sobriety and starts to plead in desperation. During the process of entombing Fortunato alive Montresor ironically taunts him with his freedom, but in the end walls him up completely and leaves him. He concludes his story, written 50 years later, with a Latin prayer: "In pace requiescat!" ("Let him rest in peace!")
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Unread 11-14-2005, 05:38 AM
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I don't know where to place this - maybe just on www.wikepedia.org - pass. I haven't been following wikepedia developments, and I don't know where it stands on the cultural landscape.

I've read neither story. That said, your comparison is thorough and persuasive, though I'm unable to comment knowingly on the "manifestation of modern America’s penchant for self-analysis, gratuitous confession and exhibitionism".

But is this merely King acknowledging how similar the two stories are, or is “Dolan’s Cadillac” in fact a modern version of “The Cask of Amontillado”? - or what's the diffence? You end by plumping for the "modern version" option, but the question/conclusion sound too much like mere essay-shaping ploys.
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Unread 11-01-2010, 10:01 AM
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Hello Duncan

Your persuasive analysis I think proves that Stephen King modelled his novella on Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" although he does not overtly acknowledge that fact. As you say, he may have included clues which would reveal to his readers the debt he owed to Poe.

Since the story is evidently viewed by the author as an archetypal horror story he perhaps did not think that he had to acknowledge the fact that he had updated Poe's tale. We might note that even the titles of the two works, King's "Dolan’s Cadillac" and Poe’s "The Cask of Amontillado" bear some similarity!

One other thing: I am giving a talk on Poe's works to a senior citizens' retirement home here in the Baltimore area in January and will probably mention your analysis as part of my talk. I was at the same retirement home last month to talk about the mystery of Poe's death in this city.

All the best

Chris

Last edited by ChrisGeorge; 11-01-2010 at 12:33 PM.
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Unread 11-01-2010, 04:59 PM
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Duncan Gillies MacLaurin Duncan Gillies MacLaurin is offline
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Chris

Thanks for your acknowledgement, in both senses of the word. The piece is still unpublished...

Duncan
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Unread 11-03-2010, 09:51 AM
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R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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Calling Poe's narrator unreliable has always struck me as wrong. He's entirely reliable. He's old-family Italian, and knows that there's a vast difference between injury and insult. No one, I think, has ever commented on the mysterious "you, who know the condition of my soul" at the beginning of the story. The identity becomes clear at the end, when Montresor reveals that the murder took place 50 years earlier. He is clearly making a deathbed confession to his priest. The "R.I.P" at the end doesn't just apply to Fortunato ("Lucky"!) but to himself.

What's fascinating is that this is the story of a perfect murder, told as a how-to-do-it story. M. is a master of reverse psychology: to make sure the servants won't be at home, he issues strict commands for them to not to leave the house; to keep F. going, he implores him to give up the quest. To abjuct him with no one noticing them together, he does so in the middle of a Mardi Gras crowd, while wearing the most generic of all costumes--black mask and cape. He doesn't even have an apparent motive since it must have been clear to others that he'd "put up with" F. for a long time. It's one of Poe's most brilliant tales.
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Unread 11-03-2010, 09:53 AM
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An afterthought: I'd like to think that Browning was somehow behind this story, which is in fact a dramatic monologue. But [i]Men and Women[i] didn't appear until 1855.
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Unread 09-23-2018, 03:43 AM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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I know this is an ancient thread but someone always seems to be nosying at it when I look at 'who's online'. Anyway, I had to resurrect it to share this thing of utter genius. Sometimes YouTube culture and the modern world fully redeems itself in my eyes.

https://youtu.be/56R3hU-fWZY

If you like this, try

Rasputin vs Stalin

Miley Cyrus vs Joan of Arc

Martin Luther King vs Gandhi

Eastern vs Western philosophers

Einstein vs Steven Hawking

and many more. You're welcome!

Last edited by Mark McDonnell; 09-24-2018 at 01:30 AM.
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Unread 09-23-2018, 02:10 PM
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin's Avatar
Duncan Gillies MacLaurin Duncan Gillies MacLaurin is offline
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Yes, these are fun, Mark. I once had a student who showed us the MLK vs Gandhi one in class.

Funny you should revive this thread now. It was only last week that I finally got this piece on Poe and King published (in my teacher organization's journal, Anglo Files).

Duncan
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Unread 09-23-2018, 02:29 PM
Mark McDonnell Mark McDonnell is offline
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Excellent! Well done Duncan. Double weirdly, I read 'Dolan's Cadillac' recently. Good story. I like a bit of Stephen King on my holidays. The Poe I've read many times.
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Unread 09-29-2018, 11:29 AM
Martin Elster Martin Elster is offline
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Hi Duncan,

I read “Dolan’s Cadillac” a few years ago and loved it. It’s an engrossing and clever tale. I just read “The Cask of Amontillado” and enjoyed it, too. I can see how Poe influenced Stephen King. I’m going to read your whole essay in a bit.

There is another King work that took off form Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Kings series of novels is called simply The Dark Tower.

Last edited by Martin Elster; 09-29-2018 at 11:41 AM.
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