The Purloined letter as a detective story/ the role of ratiocination (Eng. Hons- 3rd Sem.)

Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined letter as a detective story

Q. Write a critical note on The Purloined letter as a detective story/ the role of ratiocination.

Answer: The detective story is a tale that features a mystery and/or the commission of a criminal offense, accenting the hunt for an answer. It distinguishes itself from alternative varieties of fiction by the fact that it is a puzzle. The detective story didn't simply spring into being in its current form, but rather, evolved over time.

Poe introduces one among the foremost basic elements of the detective story, which is that the presentation of clues for his readers. This idea becomes vital altogether subsequent works of detective fiction. That is, altogether such fiction, all of the clues are available for the reader and therefore the detective to unravel the crime (usually murder), and at the end of the story, the reader should be able to look back on the clues and understand that he could have resolved the mystery. A detective story during which the answer is suddenly unconcealed to the reader in thought of unhealthy kind.

Poe can actually set the quality 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 taken into account to be the primary detective story ever written.

Poe wrote five short narratives during which he originated almost every significant principle used by detective story writers for more than a century afterward. He called them "tales of ratiocination" (reasoning). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers have placed Edgar Allen Poe at the beginning of the tradition of detective fiction.

Along with “The Murders in the Rue morgue,” “The purloined Letter” establishes new genre of short fiction in American literature: the detective story. Poe considered “The purloined Letter” his best mystery, and critics have long identified the ways during which it redefines the mystery genre—it turns faraway from action toward intellectual analysis, for instance.

As opposed to the graphic violence of “The Murders in the Rue morgue,” which features bodily injury and close to decapitation by a wild animal, “The purloined Letter” focuses more dryly on the relationship between the Paris police and Dupin, between the ineffectual established order and therefore the savvy private detective. When the talker opens the story by reflective upon the grotesque murders within the Rue dead room that Dupin has helped to solve, Poe makes it clear that the prior story is on his mind.

Poe sets up the cool reason of “The purloined Letter” in opposition to the violence of “The Murders in the Rue morgue.” The battered and torn bodies of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” are replaced by the bloodless, inanimate stolen letter. However, just as the Paris police are unable to solve the gory crime of passion in “The Murders in the Rue morgue,” they are similarly unable to unravel this apparently simple mystery, during which the answer is hidden in plain sight.

Poe moves away from violence and action by associating Dupin’s intelligence with his reflectiveness and his radical theories concerning the mind. This tale doesn't have the constant action of stories like “The Cask of Amontillado” or “The black cat.” Instead, this tale features the narrator and Dupin sitting in Dupin’s library and discussing ideas.

The tale’s action, relayed by flashbacks, takes place outside the narrative frame. The narrative itself is told through dispassionate analysis. The intrusions of the prefect and his investigations of the Minister’s apartment come off as unrefined and unintellectual. Poe portrays the prefect as at the same time the most active and the most thoughtless character in the story. Dupin’s most pointed criticisms of the prefect have less to try to with a personal attack than with a critique of the mode of investigation employed by the police as a whole.

Dupin suggests that the police cannot think outside their own standard procedures. They are unable to put themselves in the minds of those who actually commit crimes. Dupin’s strategy of solving crimes, on the opposite hand, involves a process of thinking like somebody else. Just as the boy playing “even and odd” enters his opponent’s mind, Dupin inhabits the consciousness of the criminal. He does not use fancy psychological theories, however rather imitates the train of thought of his opponent. He succeeds in operating one step before the police because he thinks because the Minister does.

This crime-solving technique of thinking like the criminal suggests that Dupin and therefore the Minister are more doubles than opposites. The revenge facet of the story, which Dupin guarantees after the Minister offends him in Vienna, arguably derives from their threatening similarity. Dupin’s note within the phony letter, translated “So baneful a theme, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes,” suggests the rivalry that accompanies brotherly minds.

In the French dramatist Crébillon’s early-eighteenth-century tragedy Atrée et Thyeste (or Atreus and Thyestes), Thyestes seduces the wife of his brother, Atreus. In return, Atreus murders the sons of Thyestes and serves them to their father at a feast. Dupin implies here that Thyestes deserves more punishment than Atreus because he commits the first wrong. In contrast, Atreus’s revenge is legitimate because it repays the first offense. Dupin considers his own deed to be revenge and thereby morally justified.

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