Edgar Allan Poe--Cask of Amontillado and Tell-tale Heart

These two stories are among Poe's most widely anthologized and read. If you've had the misfortune of sitting in one of my literature classes in which we studied one or both of these, then you probably know my fascination with applying Poe's idea of "Singleness of Effect" to the tales. That's all fine, and I do believe that my theory of Poe's evocation of a sense of dread in acquaintances who seem perfectly polite (Cask) and household servants (Heart) gets to the core of these stories. However, a new thought--one that bridges both stories--has come to me today.
In both stories, the narrator is a killer, calculating and supposedly unaffected by his deeds. In both stories, the victim is killed for an apparently trivial reason.
The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" indicates "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! . . . Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold." Thus, the old man offended the narrator unknowingly. The same can be said of Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado." Granted, the narrator complains of a "thousand injuries" and "insult," but the wrongs committed by Fortunato must have been fairly inconsequential since he does not seem to consider that they might have undermined his relationship with Montresor. In a sense, both victims can be seen as unwitting and undeserving. Certainly the thousand injuries of Fortunato are returned in a disproportionate manner, while the old man is wholly innocent.
In both cases, the killer plots carefully to commit the action and escape punishment. This suggests the primeval killing, that of Cain against Abel in Genesis 4. In that case, Cain rose up against his brother after talking with him and while in a field. One might infer that conversation put Abel off his guard while the location in the field placed the deed out of sight of his parents.
Poe's killers, not only curry the favor of their victim and plot carefully to avoid detection in the commission of their deed, but they take pains to hide the body, in both cases incorporating the corpse into the structure of their house. In "Cask," the murder is committed by walling Fortunato into a niche in the crypt, while the "Tell-Tale Heart" narrator apparently smothers the old man, secreting his dismembered corpse beneath the floorboards of the bedroom.
The play of guilt over these characters differs, yet it is present in both of them, just as it is present with Cain in his "Am I my brother's keeper?" response. Montresor attempts to portray himself as a completed unmoved killer, yet he discloses a moment's hesitation as he finishes the masonry: "My heart grew sick--on account of the dampness of the catacombs."
The old man's killer is full of misgivings and guilt. Most readers understand the sound of the heart to be either some physical manifestation of guilt or the sound of the blood coursing within the killer's ears (or both).
Both killers, Cain-like, have attempted to excise something from themselves that has caused pain and discomfort, yet in both cases, they have only succeeded in further internalizing the hatred consuming them. By secreting the evidence of their guilt within the structure of their residence, these killers effectively ensure that they will live with the guilt, discovered or not, for the rest of their days. In the "Tell-Tale Heart," the guilt overflows in confession quite rapidly. In the "Cask of Amontillado," it seems to have lay undisturbed for half a century. Montresor would, perhaps, suggest that he has not been troubled by his deed over the intervening decades, but a few glimmers within the story suggest otherwise. First, why is he now confiding this story to a third party? Whether the "you" of the story's first paragraph is a confessor or confidante, one wonders why, after all these years, Montresor feels the need to share his action. He also concludes the story with the Latin phrase In pace requiescat. While this might simply be a chilling postscript, one might wonder if Montresor wishes for something, peace, that has eluded him over the years.