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The Cask of Amontillado and A Rose for Emily

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I chose to use the short stories “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe, and “A Rose for Emily,” by William Faulkner. The two are similar in that in both of these stories the main characters get away with premeditated murder. Emily, in “A Rose for Emily”, murders her companion, Homer Barron. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, Montressor felt that his friend, Fortunado, had insulted him, and so he chose to seek revenge. The difference in these two murderers is their motivations, with Emily committing murder to keep someone whom she loved with her forever, and Montressor killing purely for revenge.  Although Montresor and Emily are very different characters, they do have one thing in common in that they commit premeditated murder. In “The Cask of Amontillado” Montresor has made sure the house is empty prior to Fortunato's arrival. We are told that, "there are no attendants at home...I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house" (Poe). Additionally, we are also aware that he took the trowel with him while the mortar was already in the catacombs. In comparison, Emily also prepares for her murder by purchasing the arsenic used in the poisoning of her husband Homer Barron. Emily does not seem to show remorse for actions. In fact, she sleeps with Homer's dead body in a room decorated as a bridal suite. Both Montresor and Emily choose to keep their murderous acts to themselves and they did not seem to care if their victim was truly aware of why they were being punished. Emily keeps her murder a secret from the entire town for decades. We learn this when Homer, or "what was left of him" was "rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt." We have to wonder if Homer ever knew what was coming. At the end of "The Cask of Amontillado," Fortunato is aware of what is happening to him and who is doing it, although he probably did not understand why. Wh

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