How would you rewrite this sentence from " the Cask of Amontillado" ?

Question

"a wrong is undressed if the retribution overtakes it's redresser."
can you make so that i, a 14 yo girl, can actually understand it.
i get undressed means not made up for and retribution means punishment, but how does it tie together. how would the punishment overtake the punisher? does he mean guilt or secongd thoughts?

sorry i didnt know i was wrong

Answer 1

A wrong is stripped if the punishment goes beyond the wrong-doer. It says what it means: The wrong is righted if the punishment makes up for, and beyond, the wrong. At least that is what I understand it to be.

Answer 2

First off, that is not undressed - it is unredressed. What this means is that the punisher can get so caught up in the act of revenge that instead of righting a wrong he creates another wrong.
I have not read the story. This what I take from just the one sentence.

Answer 3

I believe you got this from Edgar Allan Poe.
You interpret it literally, it means we always pay a high price to our wrong doing...once any wrong doing is exposed and if the victim has to take take revenge then,the revenge is bitter sweet.Remember how he took revenge in the story?He buried him alive in the catacomb.
The punishment overtake the punisher?No ,it means when you take out the devil out of an innocent man,once he gets angry,you can better go back and hide.

Answer 4

Here's the context:
http://www.geocities.com/athens/ithaca/7018/cask.html

At length she would be avenged; he should find in this house that he had violated cordiality and a welcome for the future. She must not only punish but punish with impunity. He might be timid at first, unable to believe the magnitude of his good fortune, but with a little tact, a proffering of saucers of milk, with comfortable invitations to sweet Pussie to be fed and stroked, he could not fail to domesticate himself. A wrong is undressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is also in undress when the avenger makes herself felt to him who has done the wrong.

A wrong is undressed--not set to right--when retribution overtakes the regresser--when the agent of justice becomes the victim.

If this or another answer here proves helpful in your research, you can encourage good answers by choosing one answer as the "best answer."

Cheers,
Bruce

Answer 5

It's been a while since I read "COA", but I think the general gist of the sentence is that "if the punisher gets punished himself, then the revenge is spoiled." If you avenge one wrong, only to suffer another wrong (punishment), the two cancel each other out and you're back where you started (in need of revenge for the first wrong).

Make sense?

Answer 6

it means that the "wrong will be known by the one who takes vengeance and punishes the one who wronged him first. this meaning that by taking action against the old guy he will be exposing the wrong which led him to take action. great story but more like college literature short story rather then high school. one of the greats of edgar alan poe!

Answer 7

I haven't read that story in about 25 years, so I don't recall the context. One meaning could be that "a wrong is righted when it comes back on and exposes the one who committed the wrong."

Answer 8

You've pretty well got it. Poe is saying that whatever is wrong is put right if the wrong-doer is caught (and punished, or regrets it)

Answer 9

....i would say that he is saying that if the retribution itself outweighs what the person is "retributing" for in the first place, then the original wrongdoing has been "out-wronged" ....just my 0.02

Answer 10

The influence my family has given to me has affected my whole life.