Similarities Between The Cask Of Amontillado And The Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe the father of the detective genre wrote a multitude of stories with ironic twists and turns the three I have chosen to write about are The Cask of Amontilado,The Tell Tale Heart, and The Masque of The Red Death. Each of these has specific points of irony and other more subtle parts. The Cask of Amontilado is of course about a man who murders another by convincing him he has a rare wine and convincing his victim that they are good friends and he should trust him only to murder him. The Tell Tale Heart is actually a note written by a murder trying to convince the reader that he is quite sane even though he killed and dismembered a man whom he actually liked for nothing more than having a “Vultures eye.” And finally
The Allan’s were successful merchants who sold tobacco and while Edgar did seem to get along with his new mother he never had a stellar relationship with John Allan. Poe did not seem to want to work in the same line as business as his new family and left when he was able to go to the university of Virginia only to run out of money after his first semester and was unable to continue to attend. For a while he attempted to raise funds by gambling but he wasn’t very good at it so only got himself more in debt finally leaving Virginia in 1827 and joining the Army around the same time as publishing his first book Tamerlane and Other Poems. He wanted to and did attend West Point in 1830 after publishing another book of poems Al Aaraaf, Tamberlane, and Minor Poems in 1829. He did well in his studies but was a poor soldier and was dismissed from the army in the following year after getting into West Point, at this point the Allan’s cut off contact with him and Poe began to write full time one of the first American authors to do so. He moved around for a while in the following years living in New York, Boston, Richmond, and Baltimore. In Baltimore he lived with an aunt and Cousin Poe later married this cousin Virginia who was 13 at the time of the marriage in 1836 Poe was 27. Some say that the relationship was more of an older brother younger sister and the marriage may never had been consummated but she was an inspiration for many of his other poems and stories. Poe returned to Richmond and became a critic for a magazine but his aggressive critiques and apparently being hard to work with lead to him being fired but not before he published the majority of his only novel in the magazine, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In the late 1830’s and early 1840’s