Murders In The Rue Morgue

After reading and watching both the book and the 1932 film ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ It is evident that the film went mostly it’s own way, taking only small bits from Poe’s actual story, discarding many important details.

The law enforcers are confused because they cannot identify how the criminal escaped. They declare the murders unsolvable; however, C. Auguste Dupin, a man who loves mysteries, steps into the scene to attempt to untangle the puzzle. While he is looking for clues to solve the mystery, the spectators and citizens provide insight into the story as well, setting the context and atmosphere that Poe wishes to narrate the story with. At last, after Dupin find clues that lead to a possible victim, including a fingerprint and a window that could be opened and closed from the outside, he deduces that the murderer was an orangutan. After the orangutan is convicted, the story slows down quickly, leading to the selling of the orangutan by the sailor who owned him and the increasing of the confidence that Dupin has in himself. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a strange short story because of its irregularity in characters. Not only does Poe make an orangutan the murderer in the story, he describes the peculiar attributes and characteristics that the policemen and the townspeople possess. Through the peculiar characters that he establishes in the short story, Poe gives an example of the American Dream. Dupin was a man who had fallen into poverty and destitution; however, by taking on the mystery and working diligently to solve a case that had been deemed as unsolvable, Dupin shows that redemption can be achieved through determination and confidence.

Edgar Allan Poe is the most morbid of all American authors. Poe made his impact in Gothic fiction, especially for the tales of the macabre of which he is so renowned for. “How can so strange & so fine a genius & so sad a life, be exprest [sic] & comprest in on line — would it not be best to say of Poe in a reverential spirit simply Requiescat in Pace [?]” — (Alfred Lord Tennyson’s reply to the Poe Memorial committee, February 18, 1876). Poe’s own life story sheds light on the darkness of his writings.

In the nineteenth century, society’s standards of gender roles were extremely biased towards the idea of male superiority. Men were the ones who were meant to be successful by having a job, and women were only meant to be a housewife, starting a family and taking care of the household. Men were considered superior to women during this time period, and this is extremely evident in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing. The concept of gender is a significant point of interest especially in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The women characters in Poe’s writing are often vastly underdeveloped, and in the case of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” they are the ones who are victims of murder.

Detective stories that have been published over the years all contain dramatic elements that the reader has come to expect. These conventions that Aydelotte discussed in The Dectective Story as a Historical Source are especially ever present in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue and they shed light on the concerns of the people of the time.

There are many literary devices that are used throughout Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. One device that is noticed in both Poe and Doyle’s stories is the adversary. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” there is a clear competition between Auguste Dupin and the police in a race to solve the mystery. Although Dupin and the Prefect of Police seem to be “friends,” the Prefect rejects Dupin’s help because of his “show-off” attitude. Dupin states at the end of the story, “…our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna -- or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all” (Poe).

The Murders in the Rue Morgue begins with “propositions” (Poe 2) to help the reader follow the reading through the use of critical thinking like that of a chess or card player. The chess player must wait and contemplate each move of another player, while the card player is more prone to memory perception. Poe then introduces his acquaintance Dupin and expounds on his abilities. Then “Extraordinary Murders” (5) begins the sequence of the detective like story. The murders were written about in the local paper and giving no clue, leaving the mystery unanswered. The next day many testimonial references were given in the paper and their account of the murders exposed, still without any evidential clues. The evening paper reveal the

The second paragraph on the second page seems to say that Poe, like many other romantic inspired writers at the time, sees that the power of “unusual reasoning” and analytical reasoning to be two entirely different abilities (Poe). Poe even chooses to change his description of Dupin’s reasoning ability from “special” to “unusual,” signifying an uncanny ability that Dupin has that the unnamed narrator has never experienced before(Poe 2). But at the end of the paragraph Poe shows the harshness of Dupin’s gift. Though Poe continues to use visual imagery such as, “His eyes looked empty and far away,” his choice of descriptive terms begins to intensify (Poe 2). “Two Dupins” suggests that Dupin himself has two sides to him, the “special reasoning” side and the “unusual reasoning” side (Poe 2).

Mystery novels have been an intriguing subject to a lot of readers. A famous mystery novel writer, Edgar Allan Poe, had explained meaningful life lessons within his words, in his story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. His story contains a strenuous case to investigate and the character, Inspector Dupin, is the only key to figuring it out. The outcome of the turning point had an immense influence to several things in the story. The discovery of the broken nail is significant because of its effects on how the killer got in and out, how carefully Dupin analyzed his clues, and proving even the smallest clues have a big impact.

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for the feature of sinister elements, violent behavior, and psychologically unstable characters in his literal works. Two of Poe’s well-known literary works, “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” both engage with narrators who are in an unhealthy state of mind. Both narrators successfully commit and conceal atrocious murders, but eventually, are exposed for their heinous crimes due to their own insanity. With “The Black cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe gives us two great examples of the human mind’s capacity to deceive itself, and its ability to speculate on the nature of its own destruction. Thus, this essay will present the ways in which Poe employs madness as a theme in “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

There is something odd and strange about a Poe story, satisfying in the way it often leaves the reader uncertain over whether what has just been read was a character’s real or imagined experience or whether one can actually call a Poe ending its end of the story. This is in large part due to the fact they linger in a reader’s mind with an intriguing idea of “unfinished business. There is much unclarity in Poe’s own life as there are in his characters’ thoughts, and that is he has the ability to hypnotize his readers with the heart-thumping curiosity of unmentionables or omitted detail in Poe’s work. The indulgence in a fantastical tale of forbidden romance like “Ligeia” there exists an unexpected touch of magicness in Poe’s stories about madness, death, and deception. This obviously due to Poe’s exploration of the bizarre and perverseness of human nature. In Michael Wood’s essay, “Poe’s Tales: The Art of the Impossible,” he argues that Poe “could see being buried alive, for example, both as a gag and a nightmare. Odd changes take place in a nightmare once you have seen its potential as a gag” (16-17). Going along with Wood’s suggestion, one can consider the tragic moment of revenge and justice in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” where a drunk Fortunato has battle with his entrapments and screams for release before recognizing in a defeated voice to the murderer that he has been a part of “a very good joke indeed–an excellent jest”

In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, he juxtaposes C. Auguste Dupin’s analytical powers of logic and reason with the likes of other great detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. As a matter of fact, to him, the gruesome death and despair of this story are like a delicious confection, and he displays his enjoyment by writing grim stories such as this one. Indeed, his character Dupin adopts his skills in order to discover the person, or animal, culpable for the atrocious murders. The detective employs his cognizant mind to scrutinize the remnants of the murder in order to excoriate every last detail, from the origin of the gray tresses on the hearth, to possible motives of the killer. Dupin deduces that, because

The story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe was a surprisingly fun read for me. I enjoy murder mysteries and it really held my attention. Everything within this story is thought out and has a latent meaning, forcing Poe’s audience to think deeply throughout his writing. Some parts intrigued me more than others but as all writing do the plot must have its ups and downs, in my opinion The Purloined Letter was less captivating, making it much harder to follow.

Murders in the Rue Morgue is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s more famous literary works. Arguably. Poe may be called the father of the American detective story with his trilogy involving Det. Dupin in Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Purloined Letter, and the Mystery of Marie Roget. Poe uses the peculiar eccentricities of hero Detective C. Augustus Dupin to make these mysteries enthralling to the reader. Dupin is purported to be the forerunner to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius detective Sherlock Holmes. Poe created a new genre that captivated the imagination of his readers and paved the way for both English and American authors to write detective stories. Poe gives his Detective Dupin the ability to think outside the box to take in every little detail to solve the problem using the technique of deductive reasoning.

Long before Poe made his rules about detective stories, Aristotle made his own requirements for a tragedy, such as fear, morality, and spectacle. (Class Handout) Poe's story ignores many of the requirements that Aristotle gives for a tragedy. The reader feels no fear in Poe's story because the detective is never in any true danger. In The Bone Collector, the detective is in near constant danger and spectacle is used to convey this fear to the watcher. The Bone Collector also has an element of morality that is entirely missing in Poe's story. At the end of the story, the villain, Marcus Andrews, makes it about more than just the story. He claims that because the detectives couldn't solve the clues, "[the murdered victim's] blood is on [the detectives'] hands" (The Bone Collector). Instead of trying to bring in this morality into Poe's story, Poe instead makes the story about an orangutan that doesn't even have morals. While all this makes The Bone Collector a good tragedy, it does not make it a good mystery, because a mystery requires specific criteria. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a good mystery but a poor Aristotelian tragedy because it is missing these vital