Examples Of Irony In Montresor

say “Verbal irony is nonliteral language that makes salient a discrepancy between expectations and reality” (286). In other words this is when someone says something and they mean the opposite of what was said. A few examples of when Poe uses this type of irony is seen when Montresor tells Fortunato that they should leave the catacombs; for his health was more important than sampling the expensive wine that Montresor had told Fortunato that he had found. Another time that the reader sees this type is when Montresor asks Fortunato about his cough he replies “the cough is nothing; it will not kill me” Montresor responds saying “True-true” (3). These are verbal for that fact that Montresor could not be more worried about his health he is about …show more content…
The fact is that he has absolutely zero fortune from the very beginning; not only is he sick but he is literally going to die that day because he was too greedy to taste a fine wine. Also another example that is a fairly major point is that the title is even ironic, for the majority of the story the reader believes that Montresor and Fortunato and going to see a cask of wine. In this case however the cask stands for casket, and the casket of amontillado because that is where Fortunato will die. The walls that surround where this Amontillado wine was supposed to be turn into what would become his casket. The last form of irony that Poe uses is called dramatic, this is not called dramatic because it happens out of the middle of nowhere. Instead the definition is “the audience knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know” (Author of www.englishlanguageterminology.org). In simpler terms the reader knows what is going about to happen to the characters, yet the characters themselves know not what is …show more content…
There are some reasons that can and should be pointed out however. This story is tragic and even creepy at times. One of the reasons he used reverse phycology and irony in this story is to make it both scary and humorous all in the same sentence. Such as when Montresor and Fortunato are walking down the dark and spooky catacombs he throws in some ironic instances to lighten the mood while still not making it so light it loses its scary nature. Also it takes a witty person to write a story of this nature and have people reading it over again, it takes someone that much smarter to write a spooky story throw in irony and it not change the story so dramatically it takes the scariness out of the story. All in all the story was riddled with irony and different kinds to show off how good he was at writing. The use of irony was not over used in the way that he did not continue to use the same ironic instances over again which would get old and would bore the reader. He made it were each time the story is read something is learned, and more of the technique that Poe used is seen. Also more if the irony and reverse psychology is noticed and figured out why it was used. This story that Poe writes is one of the first stories many think about when irony is mentioned. This story though it may be short in nature is filled with many examples of each type of irony, making it a