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American Literature Unit 3 Short Stories
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Short Stories
ENGLISH
American Literature
Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter. The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald William Faulkner, Dry September.
The Purloined Letter: Edgar Allan Poe
1. What is the single effect in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter?”
Ans : The key effect in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is ratiocination, or reasoning. In fact, on July 2, 1844. Poe wrote to the poet James Russell Lowell and said that “The Purloined Letter” was “perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination.”
In order to examine how ratiocination is working, let’s quickly review the story. The story is divided into two sections. In the first part, the Prefect of the Paris Police visits Dupin, a character who appears in several other Poe stories, because he has a problem. A stolen letter is being used to blackmail a female aristocrat. The Perfect knows who has stolen the letter, but he can’t find the letter. After listening to the Prefect detail his search for the letter, Dupin’s advice is to search again.
A month passes and the Prefect returns, unsuccessful. Now he is willing to give fifty thousand francs to the person who can find the letter. Dupin immediately asks for the check and, once receiving it, produces the letter.
The second part of the story involves Dupin explaining how he figured out where the letter was hidden. The reader gets to listen to a story about a schoolboy so astute at reasoning that he wins a reasoning game every time. Dupin segues from this into his own reasoning on how he found the letter. Finally, the story ends with Dupin-admitting that D—, the letter thief, once did him an “evil turn” in Vienna, so for revenge. Dupin decides to leave a clue in the fake letter that he leaves behind when he takes the original. This clue is, of course, the story’s last line.
So, really, this story is about a game of wits. We know this because Dupin mentions time and time again how opponents in reason aren’t always an equal match. That’s why the schoolboy in the reasoning game can figure out how to trick his rival players. It’s also why, according to Dupin, the Prefect can’t find the letter. Dupin says the police’s measures of investigation “were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man.” So, in this reasoning game, the police weren’t quite up to par. Only Dupin and D—, as intellectual equals, are able to play this intellectual game of cat and mouse.
2. What is the main resolution in “The Purloined Letter” by Edgar Allan Poe?
Ans: The main resolution of the story is Dupin’s realisation that the letter is “hiding in plain sight” in D.’s rooms and the trick he plays on D. to take the letter and replace it with a facsimile. Dupin outsmarts D., who outsmarted the Prefect.
In another sense, if you read the story as a kind of argument, the resolution comes with Dupin’s explanation about intellect and understanding. According to Dupin, the Prefect’s minute search of D.’s apartment was doomed to failure not because of any lack of thoroughness but because of a lack of imagination. Had D. thought to conceal the letter inside the hollowed out leg of a table, the police certainly would have found it. D., however, took into account the Prefect’s methods when thinking of a hiding place. ile knew that the police would ransack his apartment; he even made it easy for them to do so, frequently spending nights away from home. Because he anticipated the Prefect, he chose to hide the letter in the one place they would not look: in the open.
Dupin foils D. using the same logic. Dupin realizes that D. would know the Prefect’s methods; he also knew that D. would as a result choose the opposite method of hiding the letter. So in a way the resolution of story has to do with the use of imagination to reconstruct the mental processes of D. in deciding a hiding place. The story suggests that logic alone is not enough to solve mysteries.
3. What are Edgar Allan Poe’s stylistic elements? The stylistic elements that Poe uses in his stories that really characterise him.
Ans: Stylistically, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems are characterised by elements we might now associate with the horror and gothic genres. There is usually suspense, created in part by an unreliable first person narrator, and there is also often a supernatural presence. Poe also often relies on dark, sinister settings, and macabre imagery.
His poem “The Raven” demonstrates most of these stylistic elements: For example, the poem begins “Once upon a midnight dreary,” and later we are told that it is set “in the bleak December.” There is also a fire which casts ghostly shadows upon the floor. This is a typical Poe setting. It is dark, shadowy and implicitly hopeless. There is also suspense in the poem because we, and also the narrator, don’t know why the raven haunts and taunts the narrator. The raven also seems supernatural, and the narrator is convinced that it is a “thing of evil” with eyes that “have all the seeming of a demon’s.” The poem is also full of macabre imagery. As well as the “Ghastly grim and ancient raven,” there are also images of “tempest(s),” “fantastic terrors,” and the “Night’s Plutonian shore.” There is also of course the recurring image of the narrator’s “lost Lenore,” which constantly reminds us of her death.
Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” is also a good example of many of the aforementioned stylistic elements. The narrator is obviously, from the beginning, quite mad, and certainly unreliable, even though he insists that his madness is a “disease [which has] sharpened [his] senses,” rather than dulled them. There is also in this story lots of macabre imagery, most notably perhaps the beating heart beneath the floorboards, but also the dismembered corpse of the old man. There is also plenty of suspense, as the reader wonders throughout the story whether the narrator will get away with the murder he has committed. As for the setting, this too is dark and gothic. The grisly murder takes place “at the dead hour of the night,” and at the end of the story the narrator and the police officers sit “upon the very spot beneath which repose(s) the corpse of the victim.”
4. In “The Purloined Letter,” why does Dupin replace the real letter with a facsimile?
Ans: The real question should not be “Why does Dupin replace the real letter with a facsimile?” but “Why does Edgar Allan Poe have his character Dupin replace the real letter with a facsimile?” Dupin gives his friend a complicated answer consisting of several different reasons. But Poe was concerned about the impact of his surprise solution. He wanted to make sure that no one but Dupin would know that the real letter had been recovered. If Minister D- realised that the letter had been taken, he might inform somebody else, and that person might inform yet another person. The letter was the focal point of political intrigue, and there must have been others involved. The news might have spread all over Paris. The cat would be out of the bag–and Dupin didn’t know how long he would have to wait before he could turn the letter over to Prefect G- and collect that 50,000-franc reward.
If D- knew that the letter was gone, there is no telling what he might do. He is a clever and dangerous man. As long as he doesn’t know the hiding place has been discovered, he is pinned down. He will do nothing. Dupin doesn’t have to worry about him–and neither does Poe.
The police were keeping a close watch on D-. They themselves might find out somehow that the letter was no longer in his possession. D- might even go to see the woman from whom he had purloined the letter and tell her that he had destroyed it out of compassion or say something else that would reveal he no longer had his hold on her. If word got back to G- that D- had lost possession of the purloined letter, there would be no surprise in Poe’s story and no reward for Dupin.
5. Is “The Purloined Letter” a successful detective story? Why or why not?
Ans: Poe can actually set the standard of success for detective stories, considering that he wrote the prototype to all literature works of this genre, in the first place. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, published on April 20, 1841 is considered to be the first detective story ever written.
It is generally accepted that Poe was inspired by the Memoirs of Francois-Eugene Vidocq, who founded the first detective bureau (in history) and set it up in Paris in the year 1817. Since Vidocq’s book was published around 1828 or 1829, it is likely that Poe became quite enthusiastic with the mysterious nature of finding out, through clues and common sense, answers that would never be found otherwise.
“The Purloined Letter”
“The Purloined Letter ” was published in 1844, which is three years after the publication of “Rue Morgue”. However, the story serves as a kind of continuum, since it is one of the many cases of original “Rue Morgue” detective, C. Auguste Dupin. To determine the effectiveness of this particular story lets observe some of the “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” by Willard Huntington Wright (a.k.a. S.S. Van Dine), published in 1928 in American Magazine. This article is generally accepted as one of the most comprehensive in the analysis of this type of stories.
As we follow Van Dine’s rules, let’s first look at the man solving the mysteries. C. Auguste Dupin reunites traits required in Van Dine’s article
No personal love interest, but a complete passion for solving crimes
The detective is not one by name, but by actions. The moment Dupin actually starts “detecting” cues and making correlations is when he actually embodies the true meaning of being a “detective”.
The detective uses strictly naturalistic ways to solve the crime. In other words, no extra help from the supernatural, chance, or convenient coincidence. Deductive and inductive thinking are a must.
The detective is one deus ex machina capable of bringing the thoughts of several characters and summarize them into one. This is not only the case of Dupin, but also of those who came after him in literature, such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
Now, let’s look at the actual plot. The elements that will come together to bring the mystery to light must be in place in a way that is interesting and easy to follow.
Readers have the same opportunity to solve the mystery as Dupin
According to Van Dine,
The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.
It is clear that in “The Purloined Letter”, Poe was neither too elaborate nor complex in his treatment of the evidence. It can even be retold in one sentence : A compromising letter written to the Queen of England by a disgruntled Minister. This is simple enough to follow when it is the reader’s turn to put the facts together.
The perpetrator has personal motives, and situations that are relevant to the readers should be introduced.
Also in Van Dine’s article,
The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance.
Both statements fit in “The Purloined Letter”. The Minister had personal reasons to blackmail the Queen. Money, of course, is one of them. However, in a time (19th century) when blackmail was commonplace, the use of this social reality in a fictional story was not just clever but relevant to the readers of the time.
One final element to consider, and one which is of utmost importance,
The evidence should be hiding “in plain view”.
Van Dine writes,
The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.
In “The Purloined Letter” the smoking gun that Dupin was looking for, the letter itself, was in also hiding in plain view: dangling from a ribbon in the centre of the mantlepiece. Surely, the minister already figured the hidden spots where investigators would try and look first. Hence, what could be more deceiving than not hiding the letter, and leaving it be a part of all the other items in the room? Therefore, this is yet another way to show that Poe’s story sets the standards for quality and effec-tiveness in detective literature.
The “discovery” is where the magic happens in detective stories, and the reason why adepts love them so much. Being able to put facts together, remember details, make correlations, and establish motives is a formulaic way to bring to life something lurking right in front of our eyes. This requires active participation from the reader and very clever writing from the author.
Therefore, “The Purloined Letter ” definitely reunites effective techniques in storytelling and suspense that makes it a very successful story in its kind.
1. In the short story “The Purloined Letter,” what personal battle with a widely held belief is Poe possibly fighting in the story?
Ans: Edgar Allan Poe was an early and influential contributor to the genre known as the American Gothic. It is precisely due to those conventions common to the genre which lead to your question concerning Poe’s “battle with a widely held belief’ in his short story “The Purloined Letter.” Before diving into the story, it is important to highlight exactly what American authors are setting out to do when writing in this style.
In his introduction to the anthology American Gothic, Charles L. Crow defines the Gothic as “a literature of opposition.” He goes on to note that for the United States in particular, those forces of opposition which are often explored reveal the flip side to a national story rooted in progress, success, and individual opportunity. The American Gothic, therefore, typically tells the story of those who have been unable to reap the rewards of the “American dream” due to rejection, oppression, or simply a failure to succeed in what is a much more difficult.venture than advertised.
Poe is arguably a master of this style, exploring such oppositions as race, class, and religion—all of which have the power to either enhance or destroy one’s chances at success dependent upon that person’s individual history. In “The Purloined Letter,” however, Poe examines another critical component of American identity : reason. When this story was published in 1844, people were actively questioning the foundations of America and its attachment to reason. The country was moving away from the Age of Enlightenment and into the Romantic and Transcendentalist eras. Romanticism and Transcendentalism have some overlap right around the time that Poe was writing this story and share in their valuing of imagination and the individual experience. When reading “The Purloined Letter,” it becomes instantly clear that Dupin values experience and situational logic over pure reason. When discussing how he came to find the letter, he states :
I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial from other than the abstractedly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study . . . The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra are abstract or general truths.”
Therefore, in response to your question, one may argue that the “widely held belief’ that Poe challenges in The Purloined Letter” is the belief that reason rules over creativity. The systematic investigation of the police proves entirely unfruitful, whereas a bit of clever creativity on the part of Dupin quickly reveals the location of the stolen letter. In this way, one can further argue that it is not only reason that Poe questions but those agencies that rely on reason as their primary method of calculation.
2. What are the prefect’s strengths and weaknesses as a detective in “The Purloined Letter”?
Ans: You have asked a question about one of the earliest detective stories, upon which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based his famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Jne of the key ingredients in this genre is the bumbling, well-meaning policeman, who is dismissive of the skills of private detectives such as Dupin in this story, and is determined that good old-fashioned police-work will figure out the crime. You would do well to think about how Poe builds this picture up in this short story.
It is clear that Poe is none to complimentary regarding Monsieur G. of the French Police. From the start there are somewhat dismissive remarks made about his limitations. For example, consider how the narrator comments upon Monsieur G’s comment of Dupin’s that he finds it easier to reflect in darkness :
“That is another of your odd notions,” said the Pre-fect, who had a fashion of calling every thing “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”
The inference is clear – there are lots of things that are “beyond his comprehension”, and because he lives amidst a “legion of oddities” his ability to comprehend is obviously not that impressive or powerful.
However, it is clear that Monsieur G does have his strengths.. As Dupin begins to reveal how he gained the letter to his. friend, he does say :
“The Parisian police… are exceedingly able in theil way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning and thor-oughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus when G. detailed to us his method of searching the premises at the Hotel D., I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory in-vestigation – so far as his labours extended.”
Dupin continues to support this by saying all the extensive measures that Monsieur G took were “carried out to perfection” and that if the letter had been placed where they were looking they would have found it. However, Monsieur G’s greatest failing in this case was his inability to think outside the box and consider other alternatives. This is what led to his failure to recover the letter – his lack of perception and comprehension.
So, whilst Monsieur G is a diligent, hard-working Prefect who is good at his job, he lacks a crucial element of imagination and wider perspective that separates him from the greatness of Dupin. It is this fact that is recognised and exploited by the politician who has purloined the letter, and, in turn, it is Dupin’s ability to do precisely what Monsieur G. is unable to do that allows him to solve this curious case.
3. What is the plot of “The Purloined Letter” in the form of a plot diagram?
Ans: I can give you a general idea of what the plot diagram would look like. If you need more specific details, use the story to fill them in. eNotes also provides a thorough summary of the story. The format I used for this follows the “classic” literary plot diagram.
The “introduction” or “exposition:”
: This would include the introduction of discussion between Dupin, the unnamed narrator, and the Prefect f Parisian police.
: The introduction would probably also describe the main conflict of the story: that a letter has been stolen from the French Queen by a political opponent, Minis-ter D—.
The rising action of the story:
The Queen cannot formally accuse the thief as the letter contains private information.
The Queen is being blackmailed.
The police have tried several times to retrieve the letter.
They have searched the minister’s house.
They have pretended to mug him twice, thinking he carried the letter.
The Prefect thinks the minister is a poet, and there-fore, a fool.
A large reward has been offered for retrieval of the letter.
The letter must always be close to the minister so he can use it any time.
Dupin tells the Prefect to thoroughly search the man’s apartment again.
The Prefect returns one month later, with no success.
He advises Dupin that the reward has been doubled and the Prefect will split it with anyone who can assist him.
Climax: Dupin tells the Prefect to write him a check on the spot, and gives the astounded Prefect the stolen letter.
Falling action: The Perfect rushes out.
Dupin explains what he did to get the letter.
He realised the police searched places where they would have hidden the letter.
Dupin refers to a fable about a boy who was able to beat his opponents in guessing games by studying their behaviour.
Dupin explains that the Prefect’s presumption that because the minister was a poet, that he was also a fool was a flawed conclusion : the minister is smart.
Dupin mentions that the best way to hide something is to place it in plain sight.
Dupin visits the minister wearing sunglasses to hide the movement of his eyes from the minister as he looks around the room.
: Dupin leaves his snuff box behind so he can retrieve it the next day.
: Dupin returns the next day to get it.
: Dupin arranges the distraction of a gun going off in the street—and to occupy the minister’s attention.
: Dupin takes the “purloined” letter and leaves a substitute.
: He explains he didn’t take the letter and run because he thought the minister might catch him and have him killed.
Resolution (Denouement)
: As a supporter of the Queen, Dupin wants to help her; he also wants to witness what happens when the minister tries to blackmail the Queen again : he will be exposed.
: Dupin also alludes to a personal vendetta toward the minister for some unnamed “offence” committed against Dupin years before.
: In the replacement letter Dupin left, therein lies a clue for the minister in the form of Dupin insignia.
4. Who is Dupin in “The Purloined Letter”?
Ans: Auguste Dupin is the detective and main character in this mystery story. He born to wealth but, at this point, has lost his money.
Dupin has a genius for solving mysteries. This is based on his ability to go beyond logic and rationality—though he rigorously uses both—to understand the psychology of the criminals he hopes to capture. He argues that a good detective needs to have insight and intuition and can obtain this by being able to identify with others. When he can think like the person who committed a crime (in other words, get inside his head), he can figure out what happened.
In this case, he is able to ascertain that the minister who stole the letter was smart enough to know he could not hide the letter. Therefore, Dupin knows to look for it hiding in plain sight, which yields the document.
5. What events inspired Poe to write the Purloined Letter?
Ans: “The Purloined Letter” is the last of three stories written about the detective character Dupin. To determine the possible inspiration for this story, we must go back to the first of the three stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In this story, Dupin makes mention of another detective :
Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and the persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound.
Vidocq, whom he considers his rival, was also a real person and a real detective. He is often considered to be Europe’s first private detective. Vidocq was still alive when “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was written. He was known to write about his adventures as a detective in his memoirs. These are the earliest versions of detective literature.
Poe’s three stories are considered to be the first detective stories. It seems that Poe was inspired by a real life detective. In turn, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once admitted that the famous Sherlock Holmes character was inspired by Poe’s Dupin.
6. What are the similarities between Dupin and Minister D in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”?
Ans: Like Dupin, Minister D, who steals the Queen’s compromising letter, is a daring and “ingenious” person who is able to put himself in other people’s shoes, figure out how they think, and therefore outsmart them. Like Dupin, he is a “poet,” one who can think creatively and outside of conventional boundaries through concentrating on an understanding of human psychology.
The Prefect, unlike either Dupin or Minister D, is a “mathematician” who will always apply the same precise and thorough methodology to finding a stolen letter. He would always assume that a stolen letter was carefully hidden from view and therefore would search for it hidden places. Because the letter is so important, he applies his method with extra minuteness, looking everywhere hidden for the letter.
However, as Dupin would have done, Minister D uses his knowledge of human behaviour to outwit the Prefect. Anticipating how the Prefect would conduct his search, the Minister left the letter out in plain sight, after replacing its envelope with one very dissimilar to the envelope that was described to the Prefect and that he was looking for.
Dupin realises that Minister D is very intelligent, just as he himself is, and so manages to think like him by asking himself how a highly intelligent person would hide a letter. He even mimics the way the minister stole the letter from the Queen when he takes the purloined letter from the minister :
It was the minister who gave me the idea of the facsimile, when he stole the original letter. To get the letter back I just did the same thing he did when he stole it. You could even say that between our letters there is a perfect, ahem … correspondence.
7. What is the single effect in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter?”
Ans: The key effect in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” is ratiocination, or reasoning. In fact, on July 2, 1844, Poe wrote to the poet James Russell Lowell and said that “The Purloined Letter” was “perhaps, the best of my tales of ratiocination.”
In order to examine how ratiocination is working, let’s quickly review the story. The story is divided into two sections. In the first part, the Prefect of the Paris Police visits Dupin, a character who appears in several other Poe stories, because he has a problem. A stolen letter is being used to blackmail a female aristocrat. The Prefect knows who has stolen the letter, but he can’t find the letter. After listening to the Prefect detail his search for the letter, Dupin’s advice is to search again.
A month passes and the Prefect returns, unsuccessful. Now he is willing to give fifty thousand francs to the person who can find the letter. Dupin immediately asks for the check and, once receiving it, produces the letter.
The second part of the story involves Dupin explaining how he figured out where the letter was hidden. The reader gets to listen to a story about a schoolboy so astute at reasoning that he wins a reasoning game every time. Dupin segues from this into his own reasoning on how he found the letter. Finally, the story ends with Dupin admitting that D—, the letter thief, once did him an “evil turn” in Vienna, so for revenge, Dupin decides to leave a clue in the fake letter that he leaves behind when he takes the original. This clue is, of course, the story’s last line.
So, really, this story is about a game of wits. We know this because Dupin mentions time and time again how opponents in reason aren’t always an equal match. That’s why the schoolboy in the reasoning game can figure out how to trick his rival players. It’s also why, according to Dupin, the Prefect can’t find the letter. Dupin says the police’s measures of investigation “were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man.” So, in this reasoning game, the police weren’t quite up to par. Only Dupin and D—, as intellectual equals, are able to play this intellectual game of cat and mouse.
8. In “The Purloined Letter”, explain how Poe characterises Monsieur G of police.
Ans: It is clear that Poe is none too complimentary regarding Monsieur G of the French Police. From the start there are somewhat dismissive remarks made about his limitations. For example, consider how the narrator comments upon Monsieur G’s comment of Dupin’s that he finds it easier to reflect in darkness :
“That is another of your odd notions,” said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling everything “odd” that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of “oddities.”
The inference is clear – there are lots of things that are “beyond his comprehension”, and because he lives amidst a “legion of oddities” his ability to comprehend is obviously not that impressive or powerful.
However, it is clear that Monsieur G. does have his strengths. As Dupin begins to reveal how he gained the letter to his friend, he does say :
“The Parisian police… are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning and thor-oughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus when G. detailed to us his method of searching the premises at the Hotel D., I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation – so far as his labours extended.”
Dupin continues to support this by saying all the extensive measures that Monsieur G took were “carried out to perfection” and that if the letter had been placed where they were looking they would have found it. However, Monsieur G.’s greatest failing in this case was his inability to think outside the box and consider other alternatives. This is what led to his failure to recover the letter – his lack of perception and comprehension.
So whilst Monsieur G. is a diligent, hard-working Prefect who is good at his job, he lacks a crucial element of imagination and wider perspective that separates him from the greatness of Dupin.
9. How might Dupin be a double for Poe himself?
Ans: On the surface, the detective C. Auguste Dupin seems very different from Edgar Allan Poe. Dupin is French and lives in Paris; Poe was American and lived in Richmond and Baltimore. A side-by-side list of differences would be quite long.
Yet Poe clearly pulled some of Dupin’s characteristics from his own personality and habits. Like Poe, Dupin is poor and must earn a living, and his fortunes had declined. The brain power and meticulous attention to detail are also things they share, along with an unusually high level of education for the day. Poe endowed Dupin with the mental ability he employed and admired, “ratiocination,” creatively applying intellect and psychology to understand another person’s reasons and actions.
Dupin is also a poet.
And let us not forget, Poe had the cunning brain of a detective because he was the one who thought up the mysteries and codes that he sets Dupin to solving and deciphering.
While Dupin is not entirely unique in the French social world Poe portrays- there are policemen solving crimes- as a type in literature he was quite new : the first private detective hero. And even though Dupin’s France may owe more to Poe’s imagination than to historical reality, the French readers and literati were quicker to appreciate Poe’s genius than were his fellow Americans.
10. Why does Poe have the Prefect leave before Unpin begins his explanation to the narrator concerning the solving of the crime?
Ans : Poe’s main reason for having the Prefect leave before Dupin explains how he recovered the missing letter must have been to emphasise that the problem and the solution are Dupin’s and that he is the hero. Dupin may have had incidental reasons for waiting for the Prefect to leave–although he didn’t have to wait very long anyway, because the Prefect looked “absolutely thunder stricken” and left without saying a word.
At the beginning of the story, Monsieur G- is seeking help but at the same time is laughing at Dupin and ridiculing his suggestions, including
“Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault.”
Prefect G- says
“What nonsense you DO talk !”
And
“Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?”
Dupin may have been a little piqued by the Prefect’s ridicule and was taking pleasure in keeping him mystified. Since the police official had ridiculed his suggestions before the letter was recovered, he might have been inclined at least to reject them afterward and attribute Dupin’s success to pure luck.
It might also be to Dupin’s practical advantage to have Monsieur G- think of him as some sort of a wiznrcl who could produce such amazing results by magic. No doubt the Prefect would bring Dupin other problems in the future, some of which might also entail lucrative rewards. Dupin, like Sherlock Holmes, is an amateur detective, and as such he needs good relations with a police official in order to have problems brought to him as well as in order to have an aegis under which to conduct his investigations.
Arthur Conan Doyle repeatedly admitted his indebtedness to Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of ratiocination. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes often is seen to follow Dupin’s example in letting the police take credit for solutions to mysteries and also in frequently refusing to explain his “methods,” including his practice of making elaborate deductions from simple clues, in order to amaze and mystify people.
11. Are “The Purloined Letter” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” written with a third person omniscient narrator?
Ans: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” uses a first person narrator who, by definition, participates in the story and only knows his own motives, thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and emotions :
At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18–, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, …
Herman Mellville’s short story “Bartleby the Scriv-ener: A Tale of Wall Street” also uses a first person narrator who is, also by definition, a participant in the story and only knowledgeable about his own thoughts, motives, feelings, perceptions, and emotions :
I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avo-cations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with . . . the law-copyists . . .
In first person narration, the narrator refers to her-/-himself as “I,” and the narrator only knows about the inner world of other characters if they tell her/him; ifs/ he infers or deduces or guesses at it, or if they read a letter or a diary entry or explanatory article etc, or if some other character tells them something about it.
Third person omniscient narration differs greatly from first person because the narrative is told by someone who is not a participant in the story and has the ability to know the inner world of any character, thus can tell the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, motives, emotions of any character, and can tell the story through the experience of any character at any moment in the narrative (change the point of view at any time). As can be seen, by this definition neither Poe’s story nor Melville’s story has a third person omniscient narrator.
12. What is the conflict in The Purloined Letter? What is the problem?
Ans: Any story must be dramatic in order to be interesting. The drama in a short story is almost always based on a single major conflict (although there might be minor conflicts that are incidental or part of the major one). A conflict in fiction—though not necessarily in real life—usually involves something tangible, Or at least iden-tifiable. This so-called “bone of contention” has come to be called the MacGuffin.
In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House the MacGuffin is a document forged by Nora which Krogstad threatens to use against her husband. In Tennessee Williams’s A Street-car Named Desire, Blanche and Stanley are fighting over Stella, so Stella is the MacGuffin. Human beings are frequently used as MacGuffins. Countless stories have been written about abducted children, who are always the MacGuffins. The Indiana Jones movies always have very tangible MacGuffins, including a crystal skull and the Lost Ark of the Covenant. In Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, the MacGuffin is a fabulous statuette.
There is no interest without drama, no drama without conflict, no conflict without motivation, and no motivation without a MacGuffin. So the MacGuffin is the nucleus of the story.
In Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” the MacGuffin is obvious. The only problem, or conflict, is finding this letter. The story is a battle of wits between C. Auguste Dupin and the notorious Minister D-. Monsieur G-‘s account of the theft and the exhaustive efforts to recover the letter comprise the “back story.” The story proper begins when Dupin decides to recover it.
Dupin has at least three motives. Monsieur G- offers a reward of fifty-thousand francs (a sum that would have the purchasing power of at least $120,000 in current American dollars). Dupin also likes to use his analytical powers. And he tells his friend, “D-, at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember.”
Dupin does not need to go over everything the police
have done. He knows they were thorough. He tells the highly sceptical Prefect, “Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault. . . . Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain.”
Dupin is right, of course. He visits the Minister and spots the purloined letter in a card-rack but disguised in outward appearance. He tells his friend, the narrator:
“But, then the RADICALNESS of these differences, which was excessive: the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the TRUE methodical habits of D-, and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document,–these things, together with the hyper obtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.”
Poe’s story is all about the recovery of a missing document. There is no other significant conflict–although in the “back story” there are conflicts between the Prefect and the Minister and between the Minister and the “exalted” woman from whom he stole the letter. Although this information is rendered in the form of dialogue, it is no different in function from straight prose exposition.
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