Answer:
The mood of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is usually perceived as threatening, suspenseful, ominous. The threatening mood can be felt in Montresor’s words early in the story: “I continued as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation”. That he can smile at his enemy while imagining his death sets up a mood, or feeling, of something dark or evil hidden beneath the surface.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” every word has suspense in it. The author keeps the reader hooked from the first word to the last. In “The Cask of Amontillado” Edgar Allan Poe forms the creepy suspenseful mood through the setting, irony, and characters.
Pursuing this further, the setting in “The Cask of Amontillado,” conveys the creepy and the suspenseful mood. The story starts of at dusk during the carnival season. Then it slowly drifts into Montresor taking Fortunato below the river bed where it was very dark and damp. There were piles of bones and the walls were lined with human remains. To create the creepy mood, Montresor says “we had passed through walls of piled bones, with casks and puncheons intermingling into the inmost recesses of the catacombs”. This illustrates a picture of the scene in the readers mind. One can depict the dusky, moist and creepy catacombs underground surrounded by bones. The setting certainly brings out the creepy and suspenseful mood in the “The Cask of Amontillado”.
The setting isn’t the only element that makes the story suspenseful and creepy. The irony in “The Cask of Amontillado” creates the creepy and suspenseful mood as well. There were many diverse types of irony in the story that help build up the suspense. Like Fortunato’s name, Fortunato name is supposed to mean lucky and, fortunate but, in the end he didn’t turn out to be so lucky. This is creepy because the reader would think Fortunato was fortunate but, in the end the readers would be very surprised. Montresor had a very sarcastic way of speaking.
Explanation:
