Pride

Pride is a feeling of respect for yourself and the belief that others are lesser than you. Pride can be both a positive and negative quality, the positive side of it being that you have confidence in yourself and the negative side that you wrongfully believe that you are better than others. Pride should be regarded as a negative characteristic because of all the negative connotations that come along with it. These negative connotations are arrogance, vanity, and inordinate amounts of dignity. It is for these reasons that pride should be regarded as a negative characteristic. Although pride can be positive, the negative parts of it outweigh the positive parts by a large amount. An example of pride being negative is how in “The Cask of The Amontillado” Fortunato “prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine.”(Poe 132) This itself is not negative, but later on Fortunato bashes another connoisseur in wine, Luchesi, saying that “Luchesi cannot tell amontillado from sherry”(Poe 133) This is negative because it shows that he believes other wine connoisseurs are lesser than him. This inordinate amount of arrogance is a distinctly negative quality. Another way pride is negative is when in “The Tell Tale Heart” the murderer placed his “own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim”(Poe 144) This arrogance that he would never be caught led to his demise in the end. Arrogance is a negative quality because it can cause people to do stupid things and also cause one to believe that they are better than other, as shown in the earlier quotes. In the “Cask of the Amontillado” Montresor tells us that Fortunato has insulted him. He says “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge”(poe 132) This shows pride in a negative light because of how Montresor reacted to the insult on his pride. If Fortunato had not insulted Montresor’s pride, no harm would have come to him. Montresor holds his pride very highly, which is evident by how he reacted. His reaction shows pride in a negative light because he went so far as to murder Fortunato because of one little insult. Furthermore, Montresor doesn’t even tell us what the insult actually was, further emphasising this.