When you think of the name Edgar Allan Poe, happiness is...

When you think of the name Edgar Allan Poe, happiness is the farthest emotion from the mind. You have a sense of melancholy, constantly reading about death, murders, and the thirst for revenge, and sometimes having feelings of suspense when reading about thrilling detective work. Poe is the reason that we have modern day mystery and horror stories. Without his brilliance, and obsession with such morbid occurrences, who knows when the era of suspense and horror would have begun? Despite his obvious brilliance, and certainly vivid imagination Edgar Allan Poe was not a beatific person. Throughout his entire life he was constantly dealing with inner demons, which later on served as inspiration for his work. Edgar Allan Poe’s work tends to†¦show more content†¦The Cask of Amontillado (1846) is a tale of a mind plagued by revenge and a murder that has no repercussions. Montressor the narrator in the short story immediately expresses qualities of being an unreliable narrato r. From the very beginning of the novel readers are given a sense of unreliability with the sentence The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge (Poe 82). That sentence is a blatant exaggeration, and for all the readers in the story know, this may be a complete lie. The story is relayed to the audience in first person naturally being biased to one characters interpretations of a particular event. The events in this story are from â€Å"half a century† ago and thus, memories become hazy if they even truly occurred. The narrator never once gives readers information â€Å"thousand injuries† Fortunado imposes upon him, and not to mention that revenge is something that causes the human mind to go insane. Within the work Poe uses the idea of revenge as a catalyst to reflect the dark side of human nature. Montressor is enraged due to an insult that Fortunado said and therefore he â€Å"vowed revenge† (82). Intense emotions that a narrator feels tends to lead them to madness, and this is a reoccurring event within Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Within the story, a narrator becomes mentally unstable due to an obsession with revenge.