Many people have speculated about this question. It is fairly common to read the assumption that, because of his age and concern about his afterlife, Montresor is making a confession to a priest. To me, the narrative does not sound like a verbal communication to a second person who is present in the same room. It sounds like a written manuscript. There is no suggestion in the story that anyone else is present when Montresor reveals what happened fifty years ago.
Some examples of long verbal narratives to a live listener are to be found in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always takes care to make it clear that the listener or listeners, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, are present and taking a keen interest in what they are hearing. For example, in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Sherlock Holmes keeps making comments and asking questions. Otherwise the back-story being told by the client Helen Stoner would turn into a story in itself rather than being only part of an interview. Here are some of Holmes' interjections:
“I am all attention, madam.”
Holmes nodded his head. “The name is familiar to me,” said he.
“Your sister is dead, then?”
“Pray be precise as to details,” said he.
The same sorts of comments, questions, etc., can be seen when Holmes is listening to the long back-story of Jabez Wilson in "The Red-Headed League" and in other Sherlock Holmes stories. Poe could have done the same thing if he had wanted the reader to think that his story was a verbal communication or confession. But there are too many specific details which it seems unlikely that a person would remember if he were only speaking in confidence to a friend or a priest. For instance, Montresor tells the names of the two bottles of wine he shares with Fortunato. There are also too many places where a listener might want to ask a question and no question is asked.
In my opinion, the story is intended to be taken as a confidential letter from Montresor to a man or woman he has known for over fifty years. It would have been written in Italian, French, or possibly even in Latin, and found among the papers of the confidant or confidante after his or her death. Or else it might have been found among Montresor's own papers when he died, because he wrote the letter one night while drunk on French wine and decided not to send it next morning when he was sober and thought better of it. (Many of us have done something like that at one time or another, haven't we?) The document would have somehow gotten into the hands of an American editor named Edgar Allan Poe, who translated it into English and published it in an American magazine.
This theory cannot be proved, but it seems the most likely. Poe did something similar with his story "Ms. Found in a Bottle." Someone wrote a long narrative, sealed it in an empty bottle, and tossed it overboard just before his ship was sucked into a whirlpool. Edgar Allan Poe got possession of the manuscript and published it. Poe was an editor himself for many years, and he probably thought like an editor.
Poe pretends that Montresor is communicating with somebody he calls "You, who so well know the nature of my soul" because this enables Poe to leave out a lot of exposition and to focus on what is dramatic. Presumably this confidant or confidante knows a great deal about Montresor's past history and present condition, including such minor details such as what city he lives in. The man or woman to whom Montresor was writing may have known all about the thousand injuries of Fortunato, so that these would not have to be described either.
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