Murders In The Rue Morgue

Literary Criticism of Murders in the Rue Morgue Some of the greatest analytic minds in history have made discoveries that started within their imagination. For instance Albert Einstein remembered riding in a streetcar in Bern and looking back at the famous clock tower that dominated the city. He then imagined what would happen if his streetcar raced away from the clock tower at the speed of light. He quickly realized that the clock would appear stopped, since light could not catch up to the streetcar, but his own clock in the streetcar would beat normally. This eureka moment is what eventually led to his formation of his famous equation E=mc. In Murders in the Rue Morgue the reader embarks on a detective journey with an unnamed narrator
He tries to make the reader feel disgusted by the nature of the killings. He gets the reader and the police focusing so much on the grotesque nature of the murders that they dwell on it and it overshadows the goal of picking apart the pieces of the killing and solving the case. Toward the concluding paragraphs, after Dupin proves the killer was a loose orangutan, the narrator essentially laughs at the police, making a joke in the face of this brutal murder he had just described. Most would think that this shows the true sadistic nature of Poe and nothing more. Lorine Pruette of the University of Illinois Press would agree. “Poe laughs with glee at the fumbling search of the police. He dwells over all the gruesome details of the masses of hair torn from the old women’s head, the throat cut with a razor, the daughter stifled in a chimney. The sadistic impulse of Poe is shown through this…” (Pruette 387). It is no secret that Poe is a very dark man, but his purpose goes much further than sadistic impulse alone. Remember, Poe spends the entire lengthy first paragraph describing the analytic mind. This is where the purpose of that paragraph comes into play. Poe does joke at the police for their inability to put the pieces of evidence and clues together the way Dupin does, to draw such an ingenious conclusion. It is nott Dupin’s astounding analytic mind that is able to make such and outlandish statement as to say it wasn’t a human at all that committed this murder, it is his imagination. The police analyzed the murder very close-minded. The whole time the police, as well as the reader, think it was a human man. The thought of it being anything but never crept into the readers mind. Even though Poe uses the first paragraph to essentially tell the reader how to think, they are still unable to comprehend. Poe laughs, poking fun at