Fortunato's death in 's short story
"" is almost certainly not any kind of justice, poetic or otherwise. Montresor
mentions at the beginning of the story the "thousand injuries" Fortunato has inflicted
on him, to which he has now added an insult that Montresor cannot overlook. However, we are
given no example of these injuries, nor are we told what the insult was.
When Fortunato meets Montresor during the carnival, he greets him as a friend and goes
with him readily, suspecting no animosity. While it is true that Fortunato is intoxicated at the
time, he clearly does not think Montresor has any reason to hate him, and follows his murderer
trustingly into the catacombs.
Montresor is the quintessence of the
unreliable narrator, a type in which Poe specializes. It is quite likely that Fortunato did
nothing at all to harm Montresor, who is merely paranoid, deluded or outright insane. His
assumption that Montresor is a friend who simply wants his opinion on a cask of wine shows
clearly that he did nothing that could possibly justify his grisly fate.
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