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Death is a central theme in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Some assume this to be because of the death of many of his loved ones; others seem to think he is merely insane and uses this topic because of the fascination readers have with death. His concentration of such matters as bizarre deaths and torture leaves some to doubt his sanity, others consider Poe a literary pioneer as Michael L. Burdock once said.(Leone102) Poe’s parents were touring actors and both passed away before he was three years of age. From there he went to live with John Allan who was a merchant in Richmond, Virginia. He attended five years of school in England and in 1826 he entered the University of Virginia, but only stayed one year due to gambling depts he refused to pay. Allan prevented Poe’s return to the University of Virginia and broke off Poe’s engagement to his first love, Sarah Elmira Royster. Later he enlisted in the army, and not long after being in the army Allan secured Poe’s release from the army and made him an appointment at West Point. After six months Poe contrived to be dismissed from West Point for disobedience of orders. Poe’s fellow cadets gave funds for the publication of Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The most contradictory judgments have been laid on Poe’s character. Reverend Rufus Griswold uses quotes like “he is a drunkard and drug addict who walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses.”(American Writers 409) Baudelaire says that Poe is a “fallen angel who remembered heaven.”(American Writers 409) Whereas Emerson looks down upon that jingle man who shook his bells and called their sound poetry.(American Writers 409) Tennyson admires him as an equal and Yeats proclaims that he is obviously the greatest of American poets, and always, and for all lands, a great lyric poet. Some critics have therefore made claims that Poe is a mere mystifier who writes his stories only to please the public and follow the current fashion. The imaginative terror which haunts his soul, like any form of fear, whatever its occasion or immediate cause may be, appears in particular the vivid descriptions of the deaths of his characters, especially in “Ligeia.” Sometimes it takes a form of fear of the unavoidable, an insufferable vertigo and an unspeakable horror which overwhelms the heroes soul just as he is swallowed by a bottomless pit, as in “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Several critics, says John Gruesser, point out Montresor's irrational behavior just before he walls in Fortunato, to the ambiguity of the Montresor coat of arms, and to indications that the narrator suffers from a guilty conscience, to support their contention that Montresor does not satisfy the criteria for the perfect act of revenge that he enumerates at the start of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Building on those arguments, I would like to suggest that Fortunato literally and figuratively gets the last laugh in the tale because he knows what lies ahead for Montresor and himself in the next world.
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