Detective dupin7/6/2023 Poe sets up a paradigm that would eventually become good detective versus bad criminal. It wasn’t until the introduction of C.Īuguste Dupin and the stories of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter” that the features of detective fiction were solidified such as a seemingly perplexing crime, mystery, or violent murder, the baffled and bungling police, a wronged suspect, an eccentric and brilliant mastermind with keen skills of observation, an impressionable companion, sidekick, or narrator, and a clever an often unexpected solution in the denouement. And, throughout we will examine if this evidence presented by Thoms individually to see if they can be seen in other works by Poe that are not considered to be part of his detective fiction. Further Thoms explores Dupin as a reader and writer, answering if Poe’s detective fiction provides enough tension and intrigue to entice the audience to continue reading. Thoms presents evidence of a criminal side exposing Dupin as a duplicitous character capable of acts that can be perceived as unbecoming, responsible for all manner of transgressions. In the article “Poe’s Dupin and the Power of Detection” Peter Thoms examines the narrative formula of detective fiction that Poe develops in the stories of Dupin and its connection to the audience. However shadowy and manipulative, Dupin’s prowess to frame a narrative and skills of detection are unmatched. Auguste Dupin is a complex character and one who often walks the line between lawful and criminal investigative practices. If you found this short summary and analysis of ‘The Purloined Letter’ useful, you can continue your Poe odyssey with our pick of his greatest stories, his poem ‘To Helen’, his classic tale ‘William Wilson’, and our pick of interesting Poe facts.Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Writers have been purloining, and reinventing, Poe’s central idea ever since. ‘The Purloined Letter’ isn’t perfect: it’s really a ten-page story spun or spread out to double that length, which weakens the effect of the reveal, and Dupin’s long-winded explanation of this theory of ratiocination is less effective by being advanced using a few too many examples from logic and the world of games.īut we can forgive Poe these failings, for with this story – and with the methods of analysis and deduction Dupin practises in the other two Poe stories in which he features – he was inventing the modern detective story. Not only is Holmes, like Dupin, a master of logical analysis and an amateur sleuth working independently of the official police, but Holmes, too, will go on to use the idea of distraction in order to locate a missing or reclaim a missing item from a criminal (most famously seen in ‘ A Scandal in Bohemia’). In this story, too, we also see so many of the features that Conan Doyle would go on to use to such effect in his Sherlock Holmes stories. In summary, it’s perhaps possible to become too obsessed with understanding something, with the result that one misses the obvious – in this case, the fact that the letter has been placed in just about the most visible and easily discovered place imaginable … with the result that it isn’t discovered (at least not by the police prefect). Eliot once complained that an early reviewer of The Waste Landhad ‘over-understood’ the poem. It seems to invite interpretation as a parable about the dangers of over-interpretation. The epigraph, which Poe attributes to the Roman writer and philosopher Seneca, translates as: ‘Nothing is as hostile to wisdom as too much subtlety.’ The idea of the purloined letter ‘hiding in plain sight’ makes the story archetypal in its ability to carry symbolic significance. This is probably why so many twentieth-century thinkers, from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the founder of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, were so interested in it. ‘The Purloined Letter’ has the force of a fairy tale or parable: there is a purity to its plot, a simplicity, an ability to resonate with deeper philosophical meaning. (Dupin also reveals that he owes the minister some payback after ‘an evil turn’ the minister did to him in Vienna.) The reference is Dupin’s way of saying he has discovered the minister’s plan, and foiled his scheme. In the substitute letter, Dupin reveals that he left a sheet on which he had written words taken from Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon’s Atrée: ‘A design so deadly, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.’ The lines allude to the story from mythology, in which King Atreus of Mycenae, in revenge for his brother Thyestes’ seduction of his wife, kills Thyestes’ sons and serves them to him in a pie.
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