Lit Chart Edgar Ellen Poe

BACKGROUND INFO
AUTHOR BIO
Full Name: Edgar Poe
Pen Name: Edgar Allen Poe
Date of Birth: January 19, 1809
Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts
Date of Death: October 7, 1849
Brief Life Story: Poe was orphaned at a young age and fostered by the Allans, and grew up with them in Virginia. After dropping out of university and the army, he became one of the first writers of the time to make a living from publishing his work, but he had much financial and mental difficulty throughout his life. His death in 1849 was a much debated tragedy – alcohol, suicide, tuberculosis and many other things have been attributed as causes.
HISTORICAL AND LITERARY CONTEXT

When Published: “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833); “Ligeia” (1838); “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); “William Wilson” (1839); “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841); “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843); “The Pit and the
Pendulum” (1843); “The Black Cat” (1843); “The Purloined Letter” (1844); “The Masque of the Red Death” (1845); “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) Where Written: Several cities in the United States, including New York and Baltimore
Literary Period: Poe is considered an influence in several literary movements and eras, including the Romantic, Gothic and the 19th century, Victorian periods
Related Literary Works: Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray takes much of its suspenseful plot, opium-induced reveries and doppelganger antagonist from Poe. William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and even William Blake are part of the Gothic and Romantic legacy that Poe had a hand in inspiring and the wild weather and violent deeds of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for example, are strongly reminiscent of Poe’s settings. Related Historical Events: Many autobiographical details can be inferred from Poe’s work. Narrators that suffer from loneliness, temper and disease are particularly pertinent to his own life. Historical events such as the slavery and poverty of 19th century America also affected the reception of the stories and Poe’s insight.
EXTRA CREDIT

Unfinished Business. An unfinished manuscript of Poe’s was found after his death amongst his papers, and writer Joyce Carol Oates was inspired to finish it off. She turned Poe’s potential page-turner into a new story called The Fabled Light-House at Vina del Mar.
Poe’s Pets. Though many of Poe’s stories are influences by real events and characters, his violence towards cats in The Black Cat couldn’t be further from the truth. Poe was a cat-lover, and his own cat was named Catterina! PLOT SUMMARY
M.S. FOUND IN A BOTTLE

The narrator, a self-professed man of reason, has been travelling for a long time, and recently started a voyage on a cargo ship to the Archipelago Islands. Soon the sea and sky grow ominous. It gets very humid and the narrator senses a storm coming. Suddenly one night the ship is pulled by a whirlpool and is wrecked. All of the crew, apart from the narrator and his shipmate, are swept overboard.
The two spend days trying not to succumb to the whirlpool. As they struggle, they encounter the biggest vessel they have ever seen, rising in front of them like a wave. The ship crashes over them and the narrator is flung onto its deck. He hides, stowing himself away in the hold. As the days pass, the narrator writes down his thoughts, hoping to send them out to sea in a bottle someday.
Background info
He explains how the crew, which is strangely aged and foreign, doesn’t seem to sense his presence at all. The ship reminds him of ships he has known, and has something antique about it, just like its crew, but he can’t figure it out. He observes the captain in his cabin, murmuring like the rest of the crew in an unintelligible way, and fiddling with what looks like ancient scientific instruments and charts.
Walls of ice rise up around the ship, which is headed due south. The crew seem to be excited, as if they heading for some huge discovery. The narrator is terrified but his curiosity outweighs his terror. He keeps writing down his experiences, but as he does, the ship starts to be pulled into the whirlpool and he scribbles his last words as the ship is swallowed up.
LIGEIA
The narrator tells us about his late wife, Ligeia. He has trouble remembering how they met, or her full name, but her spirit and appearance is vivid to him, particularly her eyes, which are larger and darker than human eyes should be and have an expression that reminds the narrator of many things, including elderly people and certain passages of literature. Another thing about Ligeia that he loved was how educated she was – she even taught him about metaphysics.
When Ligeia becomes ill, the narrator is at a loss, and the hardest thing is that she herself does not go peacefully to the grave – she resents dying. On her deathbed she confesses her extreme passion for the narrator. She makes him recite a poem that she wrote called The Conqueror Worm and then pleads for death to be conquered instead of her.
After Ligeia’s death, the narrator buys an old abbey in a remote place and marries the Lady Rowena of Tremaine. Their bridal chamber is a tomb-like pentagonal room with tapestries whose figures appear to move. The new couple begins married life but it is far from a loving partnership and the narrator begins to be haunted by dreams of Ligeia. When Rowena falls ill, the narrator watches over her, and strange fancies start to disturb him – he believes he sees a shadow on the ground and, when he tries to revive his wife with a glass of wine, he is sure he sees ghostly drops of ruby liquid fall into the glass from mid air, but he has also been taking opium so blames the visions on that.
Rowena’s condition worsens and on the fourth night, she dies. As he looks at her corpse, the narrator is overwhelmed with memories of Ligeia. As if these memories have stirred the atmosphere, he suddenly thinks he sees a blush come to Rowena’s face, but soon she becomes pale as death again. Memories of Ligeia come flooding back, and again Rowena appears to awaken and this time she sighs, but as before, she is soon corpse-like again. Throughout the night, this pattern continues, memories of Ligeia seem to stir Rowena alive, until near morning, Rowena actually appears to rise from her bed and step towards the narrator, but she seems taller than he remembers. She removes the cloth wrapping covering her and reveals the wild eyes of Ligeia.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

The narrator approaches The House of Usher, an incredibly desolate, aged building, with a crack in the façade from roof to ground, which gives him an awful feeling. He rides on to the house anyway, because he has been called upon by a very sick old friend, Roderick Usher, who comes from a family of eccentrics, famous for works of art and music. The family is also interesting for its pure Usher family line.
Inside the house, the narrator finds Usher himself awfully changed, both physically and in his mood, which alternates rapidly between liveliness and sullenness. Usher explains his condition as inherited, and also believes that it is connected to the house. His sister, Madeleine, is also very ill and as she walks through the room, the narrator gets a ghostly feeling.
The narrator and Usher pass their days painting and reading from Gothic books. One day, Usher tells the narrator that his sister has died and they bring her coffin to a heavily reinforced vault below the house. The narrator sees that Madeleine was actually Roderick’s twin and that her disease has left an unsettling blush on her face.
After his sister’s death, Usher becomes more and more manic, and one night, during an electrical storm, Usher visits the narrator's room him in a distracted state. To comfort Usher, the narrator reads from a story, but the actions described within the story are accompanied by noises from within the house. The narrator at first tries to ignore the coincidence but the noise gets more and more real and Usher has now faced his chair towards the door of the room. He starts muttering about the noises and tells the narrator that they have buried Madeleine alive and she is now standing outside. On cue, Madeleine breaks through the door and falls onto Usher. He dies on the spot and the narrator flees. As the narrator looks back to the dreadful house, the crack down the façade splits and the house collapses.
WILLIAM WILSON

The narrator tells us to call him William Wilson, an alias that he has chosen because his own name is now detestable to him and everyone he knows. He describes the school playground and dorms in which he spent his youth, and tells us that amongst his peers, he was dominant and confident. But the arrival of another boy of the same name changes everything. They are almost identical, sharing both physical appearance and date of birth. Their only difference is the other boy's voice, which is a whisper. They form an inseparable but destructive relationship, always trying to fool each other and pick up on the other’s weakness.
One day they have a violent altercation and from then on, the rivalry is intense. One night, the narrator steals into his double’s closet-bedroom, but as he sheds light on the sleeping menace, he doesn’t recognize the face he sees. He is terrified and leaves the school at once.
William studies at Eton next, and gets into drinking. He manages to forget his past, but during one night of revelry, a stranger enters the party with the familiar whisper of his doppelganger, and he realizes knows he has not escaped. He moves on to Oxford, and gets into gambling. One night, he tricks and financially ruins a man called Glendinning in a game of cards, but the doppelganger shows up and reveals to William Wilson's friends at the gambling table how William was cheating.
Now shunned by his friends, William flees the country, trying to get away from his double. But everywhere he goes, the other William goes too. In Rome at a masquerade ball, as he is trying to have an affair with a married woman, his doppelganger turns up again. This time William confronts and tries to kill him. The room changes and he sees a mirror before him, and the face of William Wilson, coming towards him, telling him that he has murdered himself.
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

The narrator explains the analytic mind, and then describes his friend Auguste Dupin and the time that they spent together in Paris. To show what strange but ingenious company he is in, he explains how Dupin one day broke their silence by continuing one of the narrator’s silent thoughts, and then explaining how he did it.
Next the narrator describes a recent unusually brutal murder, of a girl and her mother, which has the police baffled. The witness testimonies suggest that there were two voices heard in the apartment, one shrill, one gruff, and the former so foreign as to be unintelligible to a diverse host of witnesses.
Dupin believes that the police misread the crime scene and arrested an innocent man. He and the narrator investigate the crime scene themselves. Dupin already seems to know something that nobody else does, and tells the narrator that he is expecting a visit from a man involved in the crime.
Dupin explains to the narrator how he has reasoned out the solution: the gruff voice, he says, was not in any human language; an extremely agile murderer could have come into the apartment through a window in a way the police did not consider; and the criminal would have to have had superhuman strength to inflict the injuries upon the victims. Then he reveals his suspicion that the criminal is not human, it is an Ourang-Outang. The man Dupin is waiting for is a sailor, who soon arrives, anxious to get back his troublesome animal. Dupin orders him to tell him everything he knows, and the fearful sailor obliges, telling him exactly what he had suspected. The chief of police is secretly perturbed that Dupin has outdone him.
THE TELL-TALE HEART

The narrator insists that what he is about to describe is not an act of madness.
He explains that he did not hate the old man that the story is about. The problem was the old man’s vulture-like eye. When the old man looks at him, he is filled with fury.
So he plots to kill him, and goes every night for a week to his bedchamber, each time, slowly easing a lamp inside the room and letting a tiny ray of light in. But, seeing the eye closed each time, the narrator does not do the deed. On the eighth night, when the narrator approaches the old man wakes, and cries out, obviously in fear of his life. They both wait in the dark for a long time. The narrator begins to hear the ticking, ticking of the old man’s heart, louder and louder. Then the narrator sneaks a look and sees the vulture eye staring ahead. This does it. The narrator kills the old man, then chops up the body and hides it below the floorboards.
The narrator feels a moment of relief but moments later, the police arrive having heard reports of screams. The narrator welcomes the police in and calmly takes them on a tour of the property. He is so confident that he even tells them to rest in the old man’s chamber and seats himself over the man’s remains as the talk. The narrator's calmness sets the police at ease, but as the small talk continues, he imagines that he can hear the ticking of the old man’s heart again. He begins to believe that the police are mocking him, and that they know he is a murderer. As the sound of the heart gets louder and louder, the narrator confesses.
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

The narrator receives a sentence of death during the Inquisition, and faints. When he awakens, he is in a pitch-black tomb-like room. He tries to work out the dimension of the room, and in doing so realizes that it has a deep pit in its center that he could fall into. Now the narrator nervously stays close to the wall and eventually falls asleep. Upon waking, he finds some bread and water, which he consumes. He then falls again into a death-like sleep. He awakens and now light is entering the cell somehow. He realizes too that he has been strapped to a board and there is a descending pendulum, sharp as a razor, descending step by step, coming towards him. There is also a plate of meat beside the bed.
The narrator watches the descent of the razor, alternately panic-stricken and calm. But he notices that the rats in the cell, which are monstrous and come from the pit, are eating the meat. He spreads the oily leftovers of the meat over the ropes tying him down, and the rats chew threw them, freeing him just before the pendulum hits him.
Suddenly, the walls of the room start to inch in, forcing him towards the pit. When he is inches from certain death, the walls stop pushing. He is saved by a French General.
THE BLACK CAT

The narrator explains that as a child, he’d preferred animals to people. When he grew up, he married and his wife filled their home with pets, including a large, clever black cat, Pluto, which was his favorite. Yet the narrator started to become increasingly temperamental and angry. Eventually he even took things out on Pluto and one day was so frustrated that he gouged out the cat’s eye. Though the cat avoided his master for a while, he soon came back, more affectionate than ever, as if taunting his conscience, until it became too much for the narrator and he killed the animal by hanging him on a garden tree. That night, the narrator’s house caught on fire. The narrator and his wife escaped but when they return the next day, they find that sole remaining wall has on it the shape of the black cat in the plaster.
The narrator starts drinking and one day, in a bar, he sees another black cat sitting on a barrel, an exact double of Pluto apart from a patch of white on its breast. He takes the animal home, but his affection for it is very short lived and its similarity to Pluto soon begins to unnerve him to the point of fury. The patch of white also begins to resemble a gallows and reminds the narrator of his guilt.
The narrator becomes crueler than he’s ever been, but the cat is insistently affectionate. One day he tries to kill the cat, but when his wife tries to stop him, he kills her instead. He hides her body in the wall. The black cat disappears. Four days later the police come, asking to search the property. The narrator shows them around, confident of his concealment of the body. His bravado increases and he even knocks the wall hiding his wife’s body with his the wall and discover the body and on top of it, the black cat, which had been buried alive.
THE PURLOINED LETTER

The narrator and his friend Dupin, from The Murders in the Rue Morgue, get another visit from the Prefect of police. He explains that the Minister D___ has stolen a letter from the royal lady, which he has been using to blackmail her.
The Prefect explains how thoroughly the police has searched the Minister’s apartment, but has found nothing. Dupin tells him to search again and the Prefect goes away disappointed. The next month, he comes back. He has performed another search but still found nothing. He admits that he will personally pay a lot of money to have the letter brought to him. Dupin surprises everybody by asking the Prefect to write him a check, and promises to produce the letter, which he does.
The Prefect rushes off to get his own reward from the royal lady, while Dupin explains to the narrator how he got the letter. He went to the Minister’s apartment in a pair of dark glasses and pretended to keep up conversation while he looked around, operating with the suspicion that the Minister has hidden the letter by not actually hiding it at all. Eventually he spots it, a letter right on the Minister's desk that has been turned inside out. Dupin distracts the Minister, pockets the letter, and replaces it with a copy that contains a message from Dupin to the Minister. It turns out the Minister once wronged Dupin, and the message is a quote, warning that the first insult is always remembered.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

The plague of the Red Death has seized the country and Prince Prospero, ignoring the pleas of his people and in an effort to avoid the plague himself, has moved into an ornate abbey of his own unusual design with his entourage. As the disease reaches its height, the Prince decides to hold a masked ball in his imperial suite.
The seven rooms of this suite are decorated in various colors and the fires that burn behind the windows of each room make the colors jump and dance. The seventh room is decorated with black drapes and scarlet windowpanes, and has a clock whose chime sends the guests into a dreamlike state. Affected by the colors and the chimes, the dancers writhe around the rooms, until midnight when the clock’s twelve chimes bring a deeper reverie than before and an unsettling rumor grows in the crowd that the Red Death is among them.
The figure of the Red Death appears, totally shrouded in grave-like clothes, before the Prince, who orders him to be unmasked and hung. But no one will go near and the figure proceeds through the apartment to the final room. The
Prince follows and confronts him but dies as soon as he touches him. The Red Death then takes over the whole party, one by one, with its bloody contamination.
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

The narrator describes his friend Fortunato, a wine connoisseur, against whom he has vowed revenge because Fortunato committed some unnamed wrong against him. The narrator meets Fortunato and tells him about a recent purchase of a case of vintage wine called Amontillado. He needs someone to help him verify that the wine is authentic. Fortunato seems struck by the mention of the Amontillado, but the narrator tells him not to worry if he is busy, that he plans to see another wine connoisseur. Fortunato dismisses this other connoisseur and is keen to see the wine now.
As they head into the narrator's wine cellar, the narrator keeps telling Fortunato to turn back, because the wine is in a deep vault with nitre coating the walls and Fortunato is already coughing. Fortunato insists they carry on. They go deeper and deeper into the tombs underneath the Palazzo until they reach a kind of catacomb, where the narrator's own ancestors are entombed. Within this chamber is the pitch-black entrance to where the narrator says the Amontillado is stored. A pile of bones lies before this dark entrance, the remains of a fourth wall.
As Fortunato looks into this dark corridor, the narrator locks Fortunato to the stone wall. He then starts to build up the fourth wall again, shutting Fortunato
Characters
in the dark. Fortunato moans in terror, but then he lets out a terrifying laugh as if the whole thing is the narrator’s idea of a joke. The narrator laughs in return until Fortunato falls silent, then builds the rest of the wall. He says that the tomb remains undisturbed half a century later. CHARACTERS
M.S. FOUND IN A BOTTLE
Narrator – A traveler, voyaging towards exotic islands for purposes of exploration. He is typical of a lot of Poe’s narrators in that he lives a solitary existence, only interacting with his shipmates. But when the seas and skies turn against them, the narrator is well and truly alone, stowed away on a foreign vessel that is so strange and monstrous that its reality seems questionable. On this strange ship, the narrator describes his experiences andtries in vain to communicate – in the end he can make his voice heard only by putting his diary in a bottle and sending it to the elements.
LIGEIA

Ligeia – The mystical first wife of the narrator, HER fascinating intelligence and ghostly, wild appearance makes theirs an extreme romance. Though in many ways she seems quite unreal, on her deathbed, Ligeia begs for life and reveals her true love for the narrator. She haunts him thereafter in memories and in moments when the narrator’s second wife, Rowena, reminds him somehow of her. At the end, whether it is the narrator’s altered state influencing his senses, or whether she really has escaped the grave, Ligeia appears in Rowena’s place and the lasting image of the story is her paranormally large eyes.
Narrator – Describes his lost love, Ligeia, but struggles with his memory. The only thing that remains clear to him is her personality and her appearance. He speaks with awe about her irregular looks and her intelligence and is heartbroken by her death. Afterwards, he is a changed man – he buys a desolate abbey and decorates it in bizarre taste and takes a new wife whom he subsequently hates. Memories of Ligeia come back to him when Rowena is on her deathbed, but he also admits to taking a lot of opium. It is unclear if the final sequence of unnatural events, in which Ligeia appears to return from the dead, where the narrator’s drug-fueled delusion ends and where Ligeia’s paranormal spirit begins.
Lady Rowena of Tremaine – The narrator’s second wife, she marries him for the money he inherited from Ligeia. She cannot compare to Ligeia in any way and the marriage is full of hatred. Her death mimics the death of Ligeia, and Rowena undergoes a night-long pattern of awakening and dying until Ligeia (either in fact or the narrator's mind) takes her over completely.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Narrator – The narrator acts as a pair of eyes observing the goings on within the Usher house, where Usher and Madeleine have been living solitary and in suffering. As the childhood friend of Roderick Usher, the narrator is able to detail the changes in Roderick, and to report on and, to an extent, tend to Roderick as the supernatural events of the story play out.
Roderick Usher – The last descendant of the Usher family, a genetic line that has been obsessively pure through the ages. He suffers from a nervous condition, which seems to be connected with both the degradation of the house itself and his twin sister Madeleine. In fact, as Madeleine dies and is entombed, Usher’s mood becomes very strange and it becomes clear how fatally connected he is to his sister and the house.Usher is also a talented painter and musical scientist, and Poe weaves these artistic and intellectual pursuits into Usher’s eccentric temperament.
Madeleine Usher – The unfortunate twin sister of Roderick Usher, she is infected with the same inherited disease that seems to come from the House of Usher itself. As Roderick becomes more and more manic and depressed, Madeleine feels the physical effects and becomes bed-ridden, as if the siblings share the same spirit somehow. Madeleine, by the end, is a paranormal figure, stuck somewhere between death and life, and fittingly, her final collapse into death, causes her brother’s death too, and that of their family line.
WILLIAM WILSON

William Wilson – The name that the narrator assigns himself, knowing that his real name is detestable. The narrator was once a confident, sociable child, able to dominate the playground. But over the course of the story he loses his confidence, turns to drinking, then to gambling, attempts to financially ruin a man who considers him a friend, and to having affairs with married women. He blames his fall on a mysterious double, who shares nearly every attribute with him—name, birthday, appearance—with the exception of their voice. His doppelganger speaks only in a whisper. The narrator ultimately runs from his doppelganger, and in his flight stoops to ever greater levels of degradation. The doppelganger appears at these lowest moments, revealing the narrator's weaknesses, crimes, and sins, and the seemingly supernatural doppelganger begins to seem like perhaps the narrator's own conscience. Ultimately, the narrator attacks his doppelganger, and in doing so kills himself.
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE

Narrator – The narrator travels to Paris and shares an apartment with Auguste Dupin, and the pair becomes close friends. The narrator even begins to share Dupin’s eccentric way of life, and they go out strolling at night through the Paris streets. The narrator responds to Dupin’s tricks and solutions with admiration, especially when Dupin seems to inhabit his own consciousness and know exactly what he’s thinking. He joins Dupin in helping to solve the case at the Rue Morgue, though he appears in the narrative as more of a lens through which to observe Dupin’s method.
Auguste Dupin – Appears both in The Murders in the Rue Morgue and in The Purloined Letter as the narrator’s clever companion. His highly creative, observant and analytical mind allows him to perceive where the police are going wrong, and stay one step ahead of the criminals. He loves of riddles, mathematics and poetry. He has a strange sense of humor and very eccentric habits (his love of nighttime for example).
The Prefect of the Police – The pitiable chief of the police, whose diligent, thorough but uncreative approach to crime-solving is the object of Dupin's. Though he is more officially important than Dupin, and even handles high profile cases, he shows the official protection of the city to be simple; it is instead Dupin’s undercover genius that secretly keeps the peace.
THE TELL-TALE HEART

Narrator – A man who declares himself of sound mind before telling his story, yet that story seems to refute his original assertion. His hatred of the old man’s evil eye consumes him to such a degree that he spends every night waiting for it to open so that he can feel sufficient rage to kill the old man. But though he calculates and waits, his guilt and paranoia after the crime, which he has hidden perfectly, become too much for him in front of the police and he confesses.
The Old Man – The unfortunate nemesis of the delusional narrator. His vulture-like, evil eye torments the narrator. Yet other than his eye there is nothing to indicate that the old man is anything other than a normal, old man. The old man's terror in the moments before the narrator kills him make the old man seem suddenly more human than the narrator, and the murder is chillingly heartless.
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Narrator – A victim of the Catholic Inquisition, he faints upon hearing his death sentence. When he wakes he is in a dark cell. He describes his confinement, trying to establish the cell’s perimeter, and from then on, his narrow escapes from death keep us fixed on his movements and thoughts, though he often alternates rapidly between calm and panic. It is never quite sure whether he is being watched or not, or whether his reactions are due to him being drugged or scared. As such, he becomes representative of the uncertainty of the time of the Inquisition.
THE BLACK CAT

Narrator – A man who describes himself as a docile youth with a love of animals, yet it is clear from the beginning of the story that the narrator is telling his story from prison. The duality of his personality, passionate but temperamental becomes clearer and clearer as he loses patience with his
Characters
loved ones and commits horrific acts of violence. His guilt affects him hugely, as does his paranoia, superstition and, like many of Poe’s characters, vices like alcohol and opium. In the end, his crimes haunt and condemn him to the gallows, just as he feared.
Narrator’s wife – A spouse who shares the narrator's love of animals and fills their house with pets. Though she sticks by the narrator despite his abuse and murder of Pluto, their cat, the narrator ultimately kills her after she stops him from kill the second black cat that mysteriously appears in their life. The narrator shows no grief upon killing her—instead taking pride in how well he hides her body.
The Black Cat – A loyal companion, named Pluto, whom the narrator loves but begins to mistreat when his cruel humor intensifies—the narrator gouges out Pluto's eye and then hangs the cat from a tree. After its death, the cat seems to take on a supernatural existence in the double that the narrator stumbles upon at a den of disrepute. Provoked by the narrator’s guilt and paranoia, the cat appears to return in the body of a doppelganger, this time with a white patch on his breast in the shape of a gallows, warning the narrator of his fate. The cat becomes a symbol of the narrator’s delusional, altered state.
THE PURLOINED LETTER

Narrator – The narrator of The Murders in the Rue Morgue returns for this sequel about his good friend Dupin. This time, the narrator talks to the Prefect of the police about his detailed search of the Minister’s apartment, but again, it is Dupin that solves the case.
Auguste Dupin – Reappears with the narrator as his companion. He receives another visit from the Prefect of the police and again shows him to be incompetent at analyzing the state of mind of a clever criminal. He is also rivaled this time by Minister D___ who is ambiguously cast in this story as Dupin’s doppelganger – they have similar poetic and analytic powers and have a history of one-upping each other, giving Dupin an added incentive to solve the crime with flair.
The Prefect – Reappears in this story, now in the pursuit of a blackmailer. He is desperate to earn the reward set by the royal lady. He comes to Dupin and explains the typically comprehensive but uncreative search he has so far carried out, and though he protests that he does not respect “poets” like Dupin and the criminal Minister, he depends entirely on Dupin’s help. The Minister D____ - The cunning criminal who is both a poet and a mathematician. This dual sensibility allows him to completely baffle the Prefect and the police. He meets his match in Auguste Dupin, whom he once wronged and solves the case as a kind of revenge. The Minister D____ and Dupin are actually very similar, and suggest a split personality, doppelganger theme, if a bit more subtly than some of Poe’s other tales.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

Prince Prospero – A wild, eccentric character with so much money and status that when the Red Death plagues the country, wreaking havoc and killing untold numbers, he can afford to buy an abbey and keep his entourage entertained with elaborate, bizarre parties. But when the mood of his masked ball changes, he becomes trapped in his suite of rooms and is struck down by the personification of the plague.
The Masque of the Red Death – A personification of the awful, bloody disease that is killing Prince Prospero’s countrymen. At first, he is a background presence, while Prospero’s masked dancers forget all about the world outside, but he somehow appears in the abbey, dressed like death, bloodied like his victims, and by the end of the story holds “illimitable dominion over all.”
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO

Narrator – A man with a vendetta against Fortunato because of an undescribed wrong Fortunato committed against him long ago. The goes to great lengths of manipulation to secure his revenge, showing cunning and intelligence. But the undescribed original wrong, and the narrator's frantic effort to get Fortunato to react in some way as he walls him into a living tomb, raises questions about the narrator's motives, and whether there was even an original wrong in the first place.
Fortunato – The antagonist of the narrator, who (according to the narrator) mysteriously wronged the narrator years earlier. A lover of vintage wines and carnival attire, Fortunato appears as an eccentric character, suited to the eccentric city of Venice. His fate is sealed when the narrator tells Fortunato that he has bought a special case of Amontillado, a legendary wine. Fortunato's bizarre hyperactive nature is shown in his obsession with the word Amontillado, which he repeats like a chant, but as the narrator gains his revenge by walling Fortunato up into a living tomb in the deepest vault of the narrator’s house, Fortunato's laughter becomes tragic, and then he falls silent. THEMES
RIVALS AND DOPPELGANGERS
In his stories, Poe creates a narrator faced with some kind of antagonistic person or force—a rival—that propels the plot of the story. In M.S. Found in a Bottle, the antagonist is both the supernatural weather and the strange breed of men on the ship. In The Black Cat, the rival takes the form of a cat, which seems to have a sixth sense for the narrator’s anxiety. Often the source of the rivalry is a mystery, as in The Cask of Amontillado, where the narrator explains that a man called Fortunato has wronged him and expresses his desire for revenge without ever explaining the nature of the original wronging. And then the punishment he exacts on Fortunato is so extreme, that it suggests that perhaps the act tells more about how unhinged the narrator is—or how unhinged his sense of rivalry has made him—than it tells about the criminality of Fortunato. In fact, sometimes the rivalry is free of offense entirely. In the case of The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator simply can't stand the old man’s vulture eye. Otherwise, the old man seems to be entirely innocent. The narrator's hatred is built up based on almost nothing. And yet it exists, and overwhelms him.
Poe’s use of rivalry does not always exist between a man and some external person or force. Sometimes the rivalry is the self against the self. A doppelganger is a German term for a figure, often paranormal, that seems to be the exact double of someone else. It is a phenomenon explored in several of Poe’s stories, including Ligeia’s doubling of the Lady of Tremaine and the cat in The Black Cat which seems almost to be the reincarnated in a ghostly form. But sometimes these doppelgangers suggest a condition more complicated than a case of paranormal doubleness. Sometimes the doppelganger is so similar to the teller of the story that it seems to indicate that the narrator is suffering from some kind of split personality or other mental disorder. Psychological insecurity brings about some of the most frightening moments in Poe's stories, and turns the stories on their heads: everything that seemed to be caused by some paranormal force suddenly seems like it might actually be rooted in the mind.
THE DEAD AND THE LIVING

In each story, it is the threat of death that pulls the plot along and that creates the suspense that Poe's stories are famous for. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the expectation of death, first by hanging, then with the pendulum, then into the pit, forces the narrator to confront his own mortality time and time again. In The Masque of the Red Death, death is personified and hangs over the story as a charismatic figure. This obsession with death can lend a menacing, almost masochistic tone to the stories’ voices, and a feeling of unavoidable motion in the plot, as if the characters are in a downward spiral towards their ends.
But at times, the difference between life and death is not clear-cut, and this haziness between life and death only adds to the menace of the stories. Sometimes Poe’s characters come back from death or are in a constant state of ghostliness or unreality. In Ligeia, for example, death is not the end at all, and the line between death and life and ghostly purgatory keeps changing and dissolving, allowing Ligeia and Rowena to slip in and out of mortality. In M.S. Found in a Bottle, the whole crew of the ship that the narrator finds himself seems unable to die or really live. Nearly all of his stories explore the way death haunts or impacts the living, and the porousness between death and life, life and death, in these stories makes that haunting feel real to the reader.
THE GOTHIC STYLE

Originating in 18th Century England, Gothic Literature was an important and distinctive movement in literary history, with a body of definite themes and symbols that has grown and changed as the genre has spread across the world
Themes
and across time. But some core aspects remain definitive of the Gothic style, including: Gloomy settings like castles, dungeons, prisons and vaults; haunting figures, ghostly and somewhat unreal; symbols and colors that suggest the gory and supernatural. The Gothic style of Poe’s stories ties them all together, with their morbid, gory, suspense-filled plots and solitary, romantic settings, like the location of Prince Prospero’s strange masquerade. Colors black and red, and visual symbols like evil eyes and black cats, vaults and cellars, create a very recognizable gothic world, so that all Poe’s stories seem to belong in one collection. Poe is famous for bringing Gothic literature into the Victorian era and incorporating psychology into their themes, making the supernatural more believable and close to home.
SELF, SOLITUDE, AND CONSCIOUSNESS
While many of Poe's characters are married, and others are often visiting with friends or acquaintances, the overriding sense of Poe’s stories is one of loneliness and solitude. Each story leaves the character alone to face his destiny, fear, pain, or crime by himself. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator is alone in a cell and describing each encounter with mortal terror—he exists in the cell solely with death. In M.S. Found in a Bottle, the narrator writes a diary of his struggle aboard a paranormal vessel. The installments of his adventure seem like the narrator is confiding in us, the reader, and we alone are privy to his impending doom when he knows the ship is entering a whirlpool
The aspect of loneliness to Poe’s narrators gives us a window into the mentality of the characters, giving a view of precisely how their consciousness changes, how they go from calm to panic, and a host of other psychological phenomena. For example, when the narrator first enters the House of Usher, he experiences a strange sensation in his mind that he cannot quite explain, which grows stronger and stranger as he looks into the water that surrounds the house and sees its inverted image. But even though the solitary, interior-monologue-led narration provides an intimate view of a character’s consciousness, it also accentuates the disconcerting atmosphere of the story when it becomes clear that the narrator is unreliable and can't be trusted. The Fall of the House of Usher shows us that as we delve deep into the interior consciousness of Poe’s characters, their irregularity and even madness becomes apparent, and the themes of self, solitude and consciousness become tinged with menace and suspicion.
THE POWER OF MEMORY

Many of Poe’s narrators tell stories that have already happened. Often, the difference between the situation of the narrator now, and the narrator then, is profound. For example, the narrator of The Black Cat begins what seems to be a domestic story about his pets, but it soon becomes clear that, as a result of the events of the story, the narrator is now in jail. This forewarning of the consequences of the tale provides the story much of its suspense. But a symptom of this voice of hindsight is a kind of unreliability. When we, as readers, know that the character talking is now in jail, for example, it raises the question of whether the narrator might be either hiding some aspect of the story or whether the traumatic events that led to the narrator's incarceration might have warped the narrator's memory of his own experience.
Stories like William Wilson begin their remembering with a description of the narrator’s childhood self. Through the lens of adulthood, childhood selves become tainted with Freudian implications and seem less than innocent. Many of the descriptions of children seem to mirror what Poe himself was like a child—intelligent and overactive and dominant—but they also portray childhood as including an awareness of violence that doesn’t seem to belong in a child’s world. Viewing childhood in this way, infused with the subsequent psychological deviance of the adult character, produces a version of events that can be deceptive and unclear.
Drugs and alcohol further cloud the reliability of memory. It is mentioned several times, though never explicitly blamed for any of the narrators’ troubles, that there is a lot of alcohol drinking and opium taking surrounding the events of the stories, suggesting that the narrator may be under the influence not just of madness but also inebriation, making it impossible for us, as readers, to trust even an interior monologue. SYMBOLS
EYES
Body parts are obviously part of the gory, gothic nature of Poe’s world, but eyes are especially noticeable as the medallion of many of the haunting figures in the stories. Ligeia is at first known to us by her large, strangely powerful eyes and it is these ‘orbs’ that come back to haunt us at the end. In The Black Cat, it is the cat’s gouged eye that begins the spiral of crime that eventually condemns the narrator. And in The Tell-Tale Heart, without any further explanation of the narrator’s moral opposition to the old man, it is his evil, vulture-like eye that provokes the whole grisly tale. Eyes appear often as part of the other-worldly realm of Poe’s stories and suggest a window to the soul gone-wrong.
ARCHITECTURE

Some of the most classic motifs of Gothic Literature are architectural - castles, dungeons and gloomy, deserted places can create an expectation of mystery, murder and the paranormal. In each of these eleven stories, locations and structures surround and often facilitate the narrative events and play as leading a role as some of the characters. For example, in The Masque of the Red Death, the strange trail of seven atmospheric apartments, each decorated in a different color and with ominous billowing curtains and candles, traps the masked partiers in a circle of doom, allowing the figure of the Red Death to close them in. In other stories, it is a domestic house or a schoolroom that forces the enclosure and intensification of the characters’ suffering. And especially in The Pit and the Pendulum, the revelation of the size and shape of the cell, and its subsequent transformation, gives it a life of its own and represents the faceless cruelty of the Inquisition. QUOTES
M.S. FOUND IN A BOTTLE QUOTES
A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul – a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. Narrator

The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of Allan columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin. Narrator

All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe. Narrator

LIGEIA QUOTES
They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals – in moments of intense excitement – that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia.
Quotes
Narrator
The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena. Narrator
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER QUOTES
I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. Narrator

WILLIAM WILSON QUOTES

Let me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn – for the horror – for the detestation of my race.
Narrator

A large mirror, – so at first it seemed to me in my confusion – now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait. Narrator
MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE QUOTES
Had the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen – although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Narrator

The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances -- to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly -- is to have the best appreciation of its lustre -- a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. Dupin

THE TELL-TALE HEART QUOTES
I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture.
Narrator

And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? – now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage. Narrator

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM QUOTES
I had swooned; but will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber – no! In delirium – no! In a swoon -- no! In death – no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Narrator

Looking upwards I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. […] In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks. Narrator

THE BLACK CAT QUOTES

I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity. Narrator

THE PURLOINED LETTER QUOTES

"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault," said my friend. "What nonsense you do talk!" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily. "Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain," said Dupin. "Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?" "A little too self-evident." "Ha! ha! ha! – ha! ha! ha! --ho! ho! ho!" – roared our visitor, profoundly amused, "oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!" Dupin, The Prefect of Police

“All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools."
Dupin

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH QUOTES

The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. Narrator

[…] while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation.
Narrator
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO QUOTES

I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.
Narrator
SUMMARY & ANALYSIS
LIGEIA
The narrator cannot remember how Like many of Poe’s narratives, Ligeia he came to know Ligeia. He says his begins with a memory. But the narrator’s memory has become weak through efforts to conjure the memory of years of suffering. Or perhaps it is Ligeia—his wife—are unclear. Ligeia’s because Ligeia’s qualities affected him origins are a mystery, even to her so gradually and imperceptibly. husband. The figure of Ligeia is Anyway, he remembers meeting her immediately linked to an indistinct, in an old city near the Rhine, but dream-like feeling, and in this way she cannot place what was mentioned of becomes connected also to all longing or

The narrator describes the feeling of almost remembering something, which he thinks is one of the most thrilling human feelings. He has felt this way about the expression of Ligeia’s eyes. Sometimes an image will come to his mind that is an exact analogy for the effect that Ligeia’s eyes have on him. Things like running water and moths, the faces of very elderly people, and particular stars, inspire him to remember Ligeia.
The narrator has also been reminded of Ligeia by music and literature, and a certain book in particular by Joseph Glanville. He gives a quote from this volume, which is also the story’s epigram, about the power of the will and how God himself is a will. He has only found the connection between this passage and Ligeia after lots of contemplation, but now he believes it is something about her intensity. He describes how she is outwardly calm but has outbursts of temper like no other, and at these moments, her large eyes became huge and her voice took on a melodious, powerful energy.
The narrator tells us that Ligeia was also very educated – she read all the time and knew many languages fluently. He has never known such knowledge in a woman and can find no fault in her intelligence, which thrills him to remember. She studied metaphysics and seemed so superior to him in her knowledge that he let her guide him and felt the scope of his knowledge expanding.
So when Ligeia dies, the narrator is left alone, without both his teacher and wife. He is like a lost child. As illness took her strength away, she read less and her once wild eyes grew dim. The narrator knew that she was about to die and struggled to reckon with this truth. Shockingly to him, Ligeia also struggles to think of death, and her visible terror as she lies on her death bed is unbearable to watch.
It is not until the last moment, that Ligeia becomes still, her voice low and soft again, and confesses the fierceness of her love for her husband. The narrator has never imagined her love to be as fierce as this, and he feels both blessed and cursed to be losing her now. Her confessions speak to him of her desire to live, and he cannot express how horrible they are to hear.
Ligeia has a strange effect on the narrator’s mind. His memory of her is made up of ethereal qualities that are neither human nor inhuman. The objects and animals and heavenly bodies that she inspires give her an otherworldly, larger than life character that looms over the narrator and the story.

The connection of Ligeia to the divine gives her a power not just over the narrator but over his whole world. She becomes larger than a human character and transforms into abstract concepts like energy and will. Giving his wife this power and comparing her to a goddess on one hand shows the depth of his love. At the same time, it’s unclear if these traits of Ligeia’s were real, or are rather products of the narrator’s own overpowering sense of loss at her death. It is possible, in fact, to see Ligeia as a kind of embodiment of grief—calm, with outbursts of powerful energy. Poe’s triumph in the story is to have Ligeia be both—both a kind of supernatural being and potentially “enhanced” by the narrator’s grief-filled memories.

Poe gives Ligeia not only a physically intimidating character but also an intellectual superiority over the narrator, so that she becomes a kind of ultimate figure, both lover, mother and teacher.

Like a flame about to go out, Ligeia’s supernatural qualities begin to wither on her death bed and the narrator suffers a horrible realization of what he is about to lose. The loss of strength in the eyes removes Ligeia’s extraordinariness and makes her seem more human, which in turn makes her tragic refusal to accept death all the more upsetting.

In addition to Ligeia’s qualities of intelligence and beauty, the narrator finally sees evidence of her affection for him, a quality that he never expected. This show of love in the last hours of her life gives Ligeia more humanity that fills the narrator with sympathy, and with a sense of loss.
At midnight, on the night of her death, Ligeia asks her husband to recite to her a particular poem that she has written herself about the “Conqueror Worm” about a play performed by puppets and watched by angels, in which the hero is a horrible worm, destroying the human characters. As the narrator finishes reading this morbid poem, Ligeia cries out appeals to God that the worm be conquered instead of her. She then recites the Glanville epigram. With this, she falls into her husband’s arms and repeats to him the last phrase of the Glanville quote – “Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.”
When Ligeia dies, the narrator can’t stand to be in their city by the Rhine and, with no lack of wealth, buys an abbey in a wild, remote part of England. The devastated appearance of the old building perfectly describes how he feels, and he doesn’t want to repair it. But inside the building, he has hope of lifting the mood, and decks it out with luxurious draperies and carvings and decorations. But the narrator doesn’t want to talk too much about these things. He goes on to the most important room of the abbey, the bridal chamber, where he married his new wife, Lady Rowena of Tremaine. He isn’t sure how it happened that the family of the bride allowed their daughter to marry him.
But he can describe the bridal chamber perfectly. It is a pentagonal room at the top of a high turret, with a venetian glass window covering one of the five sides. This glass was such a dim color that it transformed the light that entered the room and made everything look sickly. There are vines growing over the walls and the ceiling is carved oak with many elaborate Gothic figures shaped in the wood. There’s an incense burner in the center of the ceiling and many other Eastern decorations and granite figures in the corners standing over the proceedings like tomb sculptures.
The major attraction of the room besides all these things is the drapery. The huge walls are draped with tapestries with embroidered Gothic figures that only appear normal from one angle, so that as one moved about the room, the figures transformed in turn, so the whole room was in a kind of constant agitation, which was made worse by the wind moving the drapes.
As we’ve heard earlier in the story, there is a special connection between Ligeia and certain volumes of literature and poetry. She shows the force of this connection on her deathbed and seems to especially embody her own words and becomes very frantic with the idea of the worm. The final quote will be instrumental in the story that follows because it alludes to her refusal to submit to death.

Fitting Poe’s tendency to connect place and person, the narrator finds the old city tarnished by the memory of Ligeia. But his escape does not free him from this condition. He chooses an old, Gothic abbey, which represents the grieving, maddened state of his mind. By confining himself in this way, and surrounding himself with rich, dark decorations, the narrator only exaggerates his dark mood.

When we were introduced to Ligeia, the narrative was entirely composed of descriptions of her appearance and intelligence and all the qualities that the narrator loved about her, but in the first months of marriage with Rowena, the narrator is more concerned with the architecture that surrounds them than the woman herself. Ligeia’s memory looms in the background.

The moving images on the walls of the abbey make the structure itself seem restless—it doesn’t feel homely at all. The figures mimic the characters in the story, changing in mood and always on the verge of monstrosity.

In chambers like these, the new couple pass their first month. The narrator can’t help but notice that Rowena isn’t very loving towards him and dreads his moods. He remembers the beauty and spirit of Ligeia and he revels in opium-induced dreams about her and hopes that if his passion is loud enough, she might come back to him.
In the second month of the marriage, Rowena becomes ill, and she has feverous nights, and mumbles and moans strange words, which the narrator puts down to the fantastical images surrounding her in the chamber. She recovers but then becomes ill again, a more serious case, and her doctors can do nothing to help. As her condition worsens she becomes both fiery and nervous and she becomes also very scared of the motion of the tapestries.
One night, Rowena wakes the narrator, who has been sleeping fitfully beside her. She tells him that she sees things and hears things in the tapestries but none of it appears to him. He wants to show her that her imaginings are caused by the wind alone, but she is in a terrible state. Without the physicians nearby, the narrator goes to find some wine to revive her, but on the way he feels something pass beside him and notices a faint, angelic shadow on the ground. The narrator is under the influence of opium though and he doesn’t put much stock in it.
The narrator brings back the wine and Rowena begins to come to her senses again. But as she brings the wine to her lips, the narrator thinks he sees some red liquid drop into the cup, but he doesn’t tell Rowena and she drinks down the wine. He imagines he dreamt the strange addition to the cup and the late hour is causing him to hallucinate. But soon after, Rowena’s condition changes for the worse and he believes that she will soon die.
The fourth night that the narrator watches over Rowena indeed turns out to be her last. As he sits with the body, he sees visions and shadows. He looks to see if the angelic shadow is on the ground but it is not so he looks back at the corpse of his wife. Memories of Ligeia flood back to him and he is heartbroken as he remembers watching Ligeia on her own death bed.
Grief and the absence of Ligeia has transformed the narrator’s experience of love. He is unable to love Rowena. And to make matters worse, his sensations are exaggerated by the effects of opium, making us, as readers, unable to determine what in the story to come is supernatural and what is the product of his opium-drugged state.

The similarity between Rowena and
Ligeia continues, and their lives seem to follow the same pattern, with Rowena now falling victim to a similar condition that leaves her bed ridden. But instead of the narrator’s love to surround her, there are the tomb-like images and decorations of the abbey’s fateful bridal chamber.

Fitting the description of her as a kind of double of Ligeia, Rowena seems to have a sixth sense for the paranormal menace of this room. The narrator is in an altered state, drugged up on opium, and though his visions appear to him in a hallucinatory daze, they also seem to conjure this angelic presence that are reminiscent of Ligeia’s hold on him from beyond the grave.

The visions that began as dim, hazy mirages become clearer and the red color of the wine is definite now. Though the narrator excuses his visions as a product of the drugs, there is a definite correlation between them and Rowena’s state – after the mysterious addition to the wine, she loses all strength. Are these the narrator’s drug-filled visions? Is something supernatural going on? Is the narrator himself half-unknowingly killing Rowena and reenacting the death of Ligeia? Nothing is clear.

A pattern has occurred in the sightings of this angelic presence and the fading of Rowena’s spirit. Now, as the hallucinations cease, the paranormal spirit and Rowena are acting as one.

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER produce. Looking upon the bleak walls and windows is like waking up to horrible reality from an opium dream.
The narrator tries to explain to himself how the house has this effect on him, but it is beyond him. He thinks that perhaps if the parts of the scene were to be rearranged, their effect would be different, so he rides over to the “tarn”, an area of dark water around the house, and looks at the inverted image of the house in the water, but this image is even more hideous.
Despite all this, the narrator is planning to stay at this very residence. He has received an urgent letter from the owner, Roderick Usher, who is suffering from a nervous illness and desires the narrator's company urgently. The narrator remembers them being close friends in their childhood but that Usher always had a reserved temperament. But he also remembers that the Usher family is famous for its strange temperaments, and for creating in these moods wonderful works of art, deeds of charity, and contributions to “musical science."
Another illuminating fact about the family is the purity of its lineage – it is one direct descent, with no branches into other families – so the name the House of Usher, has come to refer to both the building and the family itself.
The narrator describes looking down into the water and feeling his superstition about the house increase within him. He explains that feelings of terror often increase the more one becomes conscious of them. He thinks it might be this phenomenon that causes the scene to appear even ghastlier and stranger when he lifts his eyes to it again. He tries to shake off the feeling and examine the house properly.
The narrator notices the extreme age of the property, but that some parts are crumbling and others are fine. The overall structure seems to be holding up against its age though, apart from a single crack going from top to bottom of the façade. The narrator travels on to the house and is greeted by a servant who takes him to Usher’s studio.
The narrator tries to use reason and science to explain the sensation that the house causes, but the scene’s horror is greater than the sum of its parts. This leads the reader into thinking that something unexplained, even paranormal, is afoot.

Like the house that shares his name, the character of Usher carries with him an inherent peculiar quality. This quality is exaggerated by the narrator’s memory and the fact that he only knew Usher as a child—all he knows of this man is through the lens of childhood memories and rumors of his nervous disorders.

The isolation of the Ushers and their fateful connection to the physical property of the family are ominous details. The setting and characters here are some of Poe’s most Gothic.

The narrator tries to reason out his sensations. But though it can be comforting to attribute a strange phenomenon to a trick of the mind, here, it adds another psychological element of horror to the tale, and ultimately suggests that the mind can't in fact be trusted.

Poe uses architecture to portray mystery. The degradation of the house, its fraying surfaces, represent the corresponding suffering of its inhabitants, just as the instability of the building's interior and foundations suggests the Usher's psychological frailty.

On the way, the narrator passes many striking objects and images on tapestries and carvings, and he feels again that haunting sensation. Then he meets the family’s physician, who has a half cunning, half confused expression. He is led into a huge room, whose windows were so high that they could not be reached. The narrator struggles to see everything inside the room because of the light, but sees that it is generally filled with tattered furniture and books and musical instruments. The room fills him with gloom.
Usher rises and greets his old friend eagerly, which the narrator can tell is very sincere, but he can see that the man is completely changed, has become very pale and thin and his eyes have a strange luster. Usher's features are so fearful that the narrator doesn’t even recognize him. He also finds his friend’s manner worrying. Usher seems to be acting to cover up his extreme nervousness, though the narrator had expected as much based on Usher's letter and what he remembers of Usher's temperament.
But Usher’s condition is severe, at times incomprehensible, one minute full of energy, the other depressed. In this mania, he tells the narrator about his illness. He says it is a family complaint. He describes his symptoms as unnatural sensations, like aversions to light and food and a general feeling of terror. He thinks that this terror will kill him. It is not that he fears danger, but the condition of fear itself.
Usher also suffers from a superstitious nature, especially related to the House of Usher – he feels that he cannot leave the building, and that the dilapidation and ugliness of its features has somehow affected his own condition, the physical rotting of the structure corresponding to his own rotting spirit.
But Usher also explains that his symptoms can be attributed to a more comprehensible cause, the long term illness of his beloved sister, his only remaining relative and companion. He talks about her with unbearable dread, and just at that moment, the lady Madeleine passes through the room, and the narrator is filled with a similar sensation of horror. As soon as the lady has gone, the narrator looks to her brother and sees him weeping.
Each vision that the narrator passes on the way to see Usher creates a recurring sensation of dread. The images on the walls, the warped height of the room, the objects from the past make a list in the narrative and create the feeling that the narrator has stepped into another world. The familiar is distorted in this house – and the menace of the doctor, a traditionally kind figure, makes the narrator vulnerable.

A change has come over the narrator’s old friend that goes beyond what he has heard about a “nervous disorder”. Usher’s eyes (remember that Poe uses eyes as a symbol of the soul and the menace of the supernatural) are very noticeable. Lustre is an interesting quality, both shining and unclear, it veils Usher’s true expression.

The House of Usher and the Usher family are attached by name. The concept of the family lineage and the building is one and the same, but this connection goes further than the narrator first suspects and seems to have taken over Usher’s mind.

A symptom of the characters’ psychological disorder, in fact the main symptom, is their dependency on each other and to the house itself. As the building appears to rot and age, so do the characters.

Though Usher explains his condition as largely caused by a kind of extreme sympathy and sadness for his sister, there is something more disturbing at work in the connectedness of these two conditions. As Madeleine enters the room, her presence has a physical effect on him.

The lady’s disease is unexplained. She seems to be gradually wasting away. She had been able to walk around but on this day, she finally takes to her bed and the narrator knows he will probably never see her again. Over the ensuing days the narrator tries to cheer Usher up. But as they get closer and the narrator knows him more intimately, he realizes how useless these attempts are. Usher’s spirit is beyond help.
The narrator and Usher paint and read together. These hours stay in the narrator’s memory, but he struggles to describe the spirit of Usher’s artistic efforts. An air of distemper and supernatural energy controls his artistic spirit. His songs are played wildly, and his paintings are devoid of realistic subject but their abstractions fascinate and terrify the narrator for some reason. Only one painting can be described in words. It presents a long underground room, with no ventilation at all but strange rays of light passing through it. Usher's musical performances use only stringed instruments, as all other sounds terrify him, but his abilities are astounding. The narrator thinks it must be his increased concentration because of his illness that allows him to play such fantasias.
The narrator distinctly remembers one example of these songs, and perhaps it is the truth of its words that have put it so forcibly in his memory. It is called “The Haunted Palace” and tells the story of a King in a glorious palace who is tortured by evil spirits, and the palace remains as a haunted shell of the family home it once was.
This recitation reminds the narrator of a strange belief that Usher held about his house: that the objects in it and the house itself are sentient, that they feel and perceive things. Usher thinks the stones of the house and the water of the tarn contain a remainder of his ancestors and senses a destructive atmosphere in the house. He believes that this is what has doomed his family to have such awful illnesses and what dooms him now.
There is a sense of reason and hope associated with a diagnosis of a physical problem—because then maybe it can be cured. But Madeleine’s condition seems purely spiritual – Poe uses the horror of the unknown to enlarge and mystify Madeleine’s sickness. It is an illness beyond reason.

The talented side of Usher is a theme that lies out of the spotlight while the narrator concentrates on the sickness of the family and the plot spirals towards its fated end. But it is well described in the narrator’s introduction of his childhood friend and seems to form an inherent feature of the character of Usher. The fact that Usher’s talent does not leave the house adds a note of tragedy to the story, and the unexplained origin of his special abilities enhances the mystery of the Usher genes.

This song echoes the details of Usher’s own life and the mention of this haunted, tortured character brings a spooky doubleness to the scene. The melodious quality of this story also makes it linger and float around the house.

This revelation is made more terrible by the fact that we saw evidence of this phenomenon earlier in the story. Even the narrator, who is not part of the Usher family, felt a change in him as he approached the house and felt its gruesome atmosphere affect his mood. He has also already witnessed the similarity in the conditions of the house and its residents, the wasting away, the aging.

The books that Usher adores are in keeping with this superstition. Usher’s favorite is a “manual of a forgotten church.” The narrator considers the rituals described in this text to have aggravated Usher’s state of mind. One evening, while they are engaged in reading, Usher suddenly tells the narrator that Madeleine has died and it is his plan to keep her body preserved for a fortnight in one of the house’s vaults. The narrator, remembering the feeling of doom that her presence had caused him, understands that this might be a wise move. Her illness was so strange that the physicians would want to investigate her body before taking her out to the open air to the family burial ground.
As Usher’s closest companion now, the narrator helps him to move the lady’s coffin into the dark, musty vault. This particular room is directly underneath the narrator’s sleeping quarters, and historically, was used to store explosive powder and so the interior is completely coated in copper and has a massive copper door.
When they have placed the coffin, they remove the lid and the narrator is surprised to find a striking resemblance between the sister and brother. Usher tells him that they were twins, and shared a bond that can’t be comprehended from the outside. But they don’t look for long at Madeleine’s body. Death has put an unnatural blush on her cheeks that is awful to behold. They shut up the vault and return to the upper floors.
After this deed is done, Usher’s mood changes. He spends all his time wandering, purposeless. His paleness is even worse and his voice takes on a permanently terrified tone. It often seems to the narrator that Usher is burdened with a terrible secret that he wishes to tell. He also hears imaginary sounds and the narrator often finds him staring vacantly ahead.
Literature is an important feature of this narrative and several others of Poe’s collection, like Ligeia. It serves the mystery and horror of the story in several ways. For example, by creating another world, a literary world, into which we delve every so often, Poe increases the sense that Usher’s world in the real one. It also gives us an idea of Usher’s impressionable mind, which is worsened by the secrecy and airlessness of the house and his inability to move beyond the house, even when his sister has passed away.

The narrator deliberately provides these particular details that give an impression of the vault as an impenetrable fortress, so that it can only be a paranormal, spiritual being that would be able to escape it.

Usher and Madeleine are something more than twins, they are halves of the same person – so to find out this doubleness at the moment of entombing Madeleine gives an added punch to the sight of the body and implies that Usher’s grief will be more complicated than first thought.

Now separated from his sister, Usher is diminished, he is unable to concentrate and unable to free himself from his lingering fears and superstitions. It is as if their bodily connection has continued after death, and that Madeleine’s descent into the tomb and into a decomposing state is pulling Usher in the same direction.

The mood is so overpowering that the narrator finds himself changing a little too. He feels this way especially one night about a week after they have entombed Madeleine, when he goes to bed and cannot sleep. He tries to believe that it is just the gloomy room and the swaying of the draperies that makes him feel like this, but he starts to shake with fright and, sitting up, has the urge to peer into the darkness, and he hears some low sounds that don’t belong to the storm outside. Fear comes over him and he gets out of bed and paces around.
As the narrator does this, he hears a footfall outside the room and knows that it is Usher. The next moment, Usher enters, pale as usual but with in a higher state of mania, but the narrator welcomes any company on this gloomy night. Usher asks the narrator if he has “seen it”, and finding that he hasn’t, comes in to the room and opens the window, letting a gust of stormy air in. Outside, a beautiful, terrible storm is raging, with rapid winds that change direction suddenly and thick clouds. There is no moonlight, but instead an aura of some kind of gas surrounds the building.
The narrator wants to shield Usher from this sight, which he explains is nothing more than an electrical phenomenon. He suggests reading from one of their favorite volumes, called “The Mad Trist”. In fact, it is a bit of a joke to call this book one of their favorites, but the narrator hopes it will be different enough from his spiritual fantasies to distract him – he thinks right.
The narrator comes to the point in the book where Ethelred, during a storm, comes to the Hermit’s dwelling and breaks down the door. As the narrator reads these words, he imagines he hears an echo from somewhere in the mansion that fits perfectly with the sound described. He assures himself it must have just been the strange storm and carries on. But again as Ethelred beats the dragon, the narrator pauses again at a sound very like the shriek that he imagines the dragon making. Though this second coincidence scares the narrator, he keeps calm in front of Usher.
One of the ways that Poe exaggerates the horror of the House of Usher is by making its effect unclear. Though we have been led to believe that it is a genetic, inherited disorder, passed between building and family, sometimes it seems that if the narrator were to stay long enough, he too would succumb to the sickness – he already feels a change in mood which resembles Usher’s nervous condition.

True to Gothic form, at the height of the mystery, the weather corresponds with the psychological turmoil of the characters, but Poe puts an interesting twist on the traditional storm, making it electrical and beautiful—much like Usher's art—and its effect ambiguous.

The narrator’s idea to read to Usher is a reminder of the childlike Usher, described earlier by the narrator, who had a passion for stories and a big imagination. So at first, the image of the narrator reading to Usher is a sweet image, the narrator taking a kind of mother-like role and comforting him.

But as the storm rages, the house becomes the antagonist again and seems to act against them. Imagination is a dangerous thing in this house, and it is not yet clear at this point how much of this atmosphere is imagined and how much is real. But, again, using lists and patterns of three, Poe gradually builds the suspicion that these interruptions are real and not imagined.

widen and rip, and with the force of a whirlwind and a thunderous sound, the house collapses into the earth, and the still waters of the tarn are all that’s left.
WILLIAM WILSON gradually, but for him it happened all at once. The event that provoked such a fall is about to be related to us, he assures, because he is approaching death.
William wishes that people would pity him. If no man has ever been tempted so awfully, and fallen so far, then surely no man has suffered as much as he has. He is surely dying within a nightmare. He goes back to the beginning, to his antecedents, who all had a tendency for imaginative and extraordinary lives. William declares himself typical of this family. As he grew, the willful temper became more established in him. He showed evil tendencies that his parents, being of the same breed, could do little to quash, and William soon becomes the master of his household.
William recalls his school, in a misty, Gothic village with shadowy avenues and a haunting church bell. He recalls the place with pleasure, but then says it's ridiculous for one so evil to take relief in memories. But because these memories are of such an important time in his development, William decides to indulge.
The school house was surrounded by a thick wall. The children were permitted beyond the wall on Saturday and Sunday, when they paraded to church. Young William watches with wonder each time the reverend, who is also the principal of the school, steps up to the pulpit and assumes such a figure of authority. The wall of the school was broken only by an impressive gate and its grounds were extensive and comprised of various nooks. The house itself is similarly winding and large, full of quaint crannies and illogical stories, so that one never felt quite at home. The school room was the largest room in the house and held several enclosures used by the principal and other fellows.
This is where William spent his youth. His youth, he says, didn’t need grand events. Even the monotony of his childhood’s days were more impressive than the crimes and passions of his later eras. He calls himself unusual, in that he remembers vividly even though there is little to remember. The emotions and sensations caused by those tedious daily events have stamped an eternal mark on William’s mind.
William opens up about his temperament and his family origins, which should invoke our sympathies but it has an opposite effect. His appeal for sympathy sounds a lot like bargaining. And his confession that he has inherited an imaginative, active temper warns us to be weary of his story. The fact that William can dominate his parents as a young child foretells future trouble.

Even William’s most beloved childhood memories are made suspicious and tainted with the Gothic atmosphere that now haunts his thoughts and the guilt that follows him around as a condemned man.

Poe creates the architecture of William’s world so that it mirrors the eccentricity and disturbing nature of the events that take place inside. Its winding, uneven and untraditional spaces form dark corners and secret places, adding to the Gothic mood that hangs over William’s childhood.

The vibrancy of William’s childhood goes beyond the ordinary vibrancy of childhood memories, because William’s childhood stands in stark contrast to his adulthood, which we are told is hellish but is craftily kept a mystery by Poe.

William’s energetic character sets him apart from his school mates and he finds himself able to dominate the playground, with the exception of one boy, who coincidentally has the same first and last name as our narrator. Because this original name is so hateful to him, William’s rival will also be known as William Wilson. This rival rebels from William’s followers and competes with him in everything he does.
Outwardly, William treats this rebellion with bravado, but he is scared of it, fearing that the ease with which his rival equals him signifies the other boy's superiority. Strangely, none of his other friends seem to notice the rivalry. It is almost a private game, and the rival’s efforts mirror William’s so precisely that it seems to be his sole purpose to embarrass him. Sometimes, an affectionate side to the battle can be detected, and William puts this down to a certain protectiveness and almost narcissism of a doppelganger.
The narrator reveals that he shares so many details of life with the other William that some schoolmates, even older boys, talked about them, and gossiped that they were brothers. They were even born on exactly the same day. But despite the trouble that his doppelganger causes him, William has some kind of affection for him. They have daily fights in the school yard, but they always manage to remain on speaking terms. The narrator can’t quite figure out how he feels: sometimes respect, sometimes hatred, sometimes fondness. But whatever it is, they are inseparable.
This troublesome relationship is the focus of William’s antics and the outlet of his wits. He plays practical jokes on his double that are sometimes violent. But William’s ploys have limited success in taunting his rival, who, it seems, has no weak spot. But there is one thing that causes the other William embarrassment: he cannot speak louder than a whisper.
William’s identity becomes more confused when we are introduced to this double character who, having the same name as William (though William of course has already explained that William Wilson is not his real name) must also be known by the alias William Wilson. The levels of remove from the man telling the story are many at this point, completely blurring the identity of the characters. It's as if William not only has a double in the other boy, but is now a double of himself.

The fact that none of the other children notice the rivalry between William and his double shows how intimately the rivalry is connected to his own mental state. That no one else notices the rivalry suggests that the rivalry might only exist in William's own mind; or it might even suggest that the double himself only exists in William's mind.

As the number of identical details and coincidences grows, the character of the second William becomes less clear and the spotlight turns to William’s imagination as the possible cause of such an implausible doppelganger, especially when he mentions their inseparable relationship. Theirs is a more personal rivalry than one would expect from a pair of children, and the mix of hatred and love that they share shows that they are more closely connected than rivals.

William’s double is the only figure to cause William to doubt his superiority, but the other boy seems more a shadow than a real person. This shadow-ness is further enhanced by the whisper that the other boy speaks in, and again that whisper suggests perhaps that the boy only exists in William's mind.

William’s double has also found William's weakness, though how the other boy discovered it is beyond William, because he sees it as a small, petty thing. William is embarrassed about his common last name. The fact that the other William shares it makes him even angrier, and whenever they are confused for each other, or he hears the name repeated, his anger grows. As the rivalry grows more and more severe, it becomes obvious how physically identical the boys are too.
William is worried that the older boys at school are talking about this relationship between the two boys, but there is no evidence to suggest they have noticed anything. It is obvious that the second William has noticed their similarity too; William can tell because of how he uses it against him. The other William's favorite trick is to do an imitation of William, mimicking perfectly his dress, mannerisms, and, apart from the volume, his tone of voice. This imitation tortures William. The only consolation is that no one else seems to have noticed it. His double seems to really enjoy the effect he’s having. William does not understand why everyone else is ignoring what’s going on. Maybe, he thinks, it's because the imitation is so focused at him that it escapes others’ notice.
Another thing William hates is the way his double talks down to him, offering condescending advice, although he admits that the advice is not immature or misguided, and he knows that if he had followed some of it, he might be a happier man today. But as a boy this counsel infuriates him and the doppelganger’s arrogance makes their rivalry become more and more bitter. The narrator had thought that their rivalry was akin to friendship in a way, but now it is all hatred.
The doppelganger William notices this change and starts to avoid William. On one occasion around this time, the pair get into a fight, and the tone and openness of the doppelganger astonishes William, because it reminds him so much of his infancy, some barely formed childhood memory that he can’t explain. It is a fleeting sensation but he mentions it because it occurred on the day of their last conversation and he wants to remember the day properly.
William’s embarrassment for his common surname shows an egotistical attitude – he wants to be the unique and special. Note how the rivalry seems to make the other boy more real, more similar. The rivalry, in some ways, seems to be what makes the other boy exist.

The doubleness of the two Williams becomes increasingly complicated. Not only do they share identical physical features, birthdays, and a host of other coincidental details, but their personalities now become almost identical when William’s rival starts mimicking him. Considering their already perfect symmetry, this new hobby must make it impossible to tell the boys apart. We as readers are stuck in the narrator’s perspective, though, making it seem like the rivals are in their own little world, so we don’t really get a clue as to how they appear to their classmates (who don't even seem to notice the other boy's antics).

William’s double annoys him with advice but William knows that he should be listening to it. Some of William’s anger comes from the fact that his double might actually have a kind of moral wisdom that William himself doesn’t have. In this way, the whispering, possibly imaginary double starts to seem like a kind of conscience, which William (who seems like kind of a psychopath, to be blunt) is trying desperately to ignore.

The pattern of affection and hatred that has driven the relationship of the two William’s has become more volatile, and at the same time draws them even closer as William now associates his double with a sense from his infancy.

The narrator reminds us of the awkward shape of the school building and all its nooks and crannies. Some of these little alcoves were turned into dormitories, and this is where William’s double lives. One night, William gets up when everyone is asleep – he has been plotting a practical joke that will make his double aware of his hatred. He enters the tiny room and when he is sure that his double is asleep, he brings his lamp in and draws back the curtains that surround the boy’s bed. But as the light hits the boy’s face, the narrator cannot believe his eyes. He had always been a perfect replica but now he doesn’t recognize his own double! Terrified, William hurries from the closet and leaves the school house, never to return again.
After a few months, William starts studying at Eton instead and the strength of the horrible memory fades – he now remembers that night as if remembering a hallucination rather than a real occurrence. And his life at Eton, filled with folly and thoughtless games, promotes his unserious view of life. While at Eton, he passes years of careless misery, and develops bad habits. One night, he invites some peers to drink with him and their revelry is unbridled, and reaches its peak as the sun begins to rise.
At the height of the party, William is about to make a toast when he is interrupted by the announcement that someone has arrived to speak with him. In his drunken state, William is excited by the interruption. He goes directly to the small hallway, which is almost completely dark. He makes out a figure waiting for him, dressed in a morning coat just like he is. Then, as he enters the room, the figure rushes towards him and announces himself as William Wilson in a chilling whisper. It is the quality of this voice that shakes William to his core and reminds him violently of his childhood. But when he recovers his senses, the figure is gone.
Though the event remains vivid to William afterwards, it also has a paranormal quality that makes him more curious than frightened. He knows well the form of the apparition but wonders why and how he appeared. The only thing he can find out is that a family accident caused his double to leave the old boarding school on the same day that the narrator did. But he is soon distracted when he moves to the city of Oxford, a move that has been funded by his parents.
The facets of the rival William’s character that differ from the narrator’s character are interesting to collect. The whispering voice is one example, and here’s another, the fact that the rival William sleeps in a closet instead of a normal bedroom, as if he has been hidden away. Poe cleverly uses our expectations for more and more doppelganger details and surprises us with the even more horrible idea of finding one’s doppelganger transformed. And William's own horror suggests, even as he hates his doppelganger, how much he has come to rely on it being his doppelganger.

William is no longer a child but his traumatic childhood memories haunt him in his new habits. His lively, domineering personality seeks an outlet, which was always filled and flattered by the presence of his double, but now goes into vices like drinking instead.

In the height of the careless atmosphere of the party, William is caught off guard by the appearance of this figure. The sudden switch from the bright loud party to the confined dark corridor and the sudden approach of the double is an explosive reminder that the horrors of the past remain unresolved. The experience also once again suggests the sudden appearance of one's conscience in the midst of doing something wrong.

Though the narrator fled his old school in fear, the old obsession comes back to him and the doppelganger seems to feel the same way, having sought William out. The meeting is so unfinished and curious that even when the narrator describes himself moving on to Oxford, we know that the rival is still lurking.

The narrator begins this new stage in style and luxury and with an even greater love of danger and revelry. He tells us that we will hardly believe that he could sink to gambling but he does. He knows that his close school mates would rather disbelieve their eyes than think that the sociable, generous figure of their youth had turned to such a base vice.
William introduces a new character, a wealthy young man called Glendinning, whose “weak intellect” makes him the perfect gambling partner. William plays him frequently, letting him win a lot of money in the first games. Then, when he has befriended and soothed Glendinning enough, they meet with other Oxford boys to gamble.
William ensures that Glendinning is the only opponent left in the game, and has been, at William’s invitation, drinking liberally all evening, so that at one turn in the game, Glendinning proposes doubling the stakes. William feigns reluctance. Everything is going according to plan and Glendinning bets larger and larger sums, and gets more in debt, but his face, which had been flushed with wine, now looks very sickly. William had thought that he had so much money that it wouldn’t matter what he lost, but the concerned whispers of his friends tell him that he has effected the man’s complete financial ruin.
Embarrassment and sadness comes over everybody. William is relieved by an unexpected interruption – the doors open suddenly, blowing out all the candles. In the dim light, a stranger enters in a cloak. The room is not totally black but they can sense he is there. Then, in an unforgettable whisper, summoning all present to listen, he says it is his duty to inform them of the true nature of their host, and directs them to investigate William’s shirt cuff, which he claims hides some little packages. The room is stunned. The visitor leaves as quickly as he arrived.
The narrator’s life grows increasingly excessive. He wants more and more wealth and the closer he comes to ruin, the more his vices overtake him. Without his rival (or conscience?), William is free to dominate his social circle.

Glendinning appears as another rival figure for William, but this time, he is no match for William’s personality. William’s active pursuit of Glendinning shows us that, despite his hatred for the other William of his childhood, part of him needs a rival to sustain his power.

William is fueled by the presence of a challenger like Glendinning and is so fired up by the rivalry that he becomes heartless, using Glendinning like a pawn in his game and taking his money ruthlessly. But Glendinning is found to be vulnerable. William is used to dealing with his double, who is almost without weakness, so when he finds Glendinning destroyed by his tactics, William is brought down to earth.

Just like at school, the other William knows everything about the narrator – how he could have known about the secret card deck or even planted it there, shows his supernatural presence and connection to the narrator that goes beyond friendship and rivalry to something more intimate. Again, one possibility is that he is an embodiment of William's conscience, that his revelation of William's cheating is in fact William himself revealing that cheating in a sudden fit of conscience.

The narrator can hardly describe his terror when pairs of hands seize him and he is searched by his friends, who find, as predicted, packets of false cards used for cheating. The discovery is greeted with silent contempt by his friends. The host of the party asks him to leave immediately and quit Oxford, and hands him his cloak. William is so embarrassed that he expects he will lash out at the host, but something else occurs to him with more force. He notices that he is already holding his cloak, an unusually expensive one in a strange fashion, and the one he is being offered is an exact replica. He remembers that the figure had also worn a cloak. He thinks on his feet and takes the replica without anyone noticing that he now carries two cloaks. He leaves the room, in painful disgrace, and soon after, leaves Oxford, and the country.
William tries to escape his alter ego, but even on the continent, he finds signs of the other William. He flees from country to country, each time pursued by his rival. He again questions with all his might why and how this man is pursuing him but realizes that the only offence his doppelganger is committing is stopping certain immoral deeds that the narrator has schemed, like his cheating of Glendinning. The narrator also notices that, though his double always wears a matching outfit, he never shows his face. William wonders if he really believes that he can avoid being recognized as the original doppelganger.
William hurries to the final stage of the story. He admits that through all these encounters, he had been frightened of his doppelganger. He had felt deep awe as well as terror, which had stopped him from fighting back. As time goes on, he drinks more and more and his temper worsens, and as it does, he becomes more firm with his rival. He feels that in becoming more courageous he creates the opposite transformation in the other William. He feels hopeful that his curse won’t last forever.
William is now in a position of ridicule and disrespect from his group of peers that he once dominated. This is a shock to the system and William’s reputation is ruined. But the real uneasiness of the room is the lingering sensation that William’s curse, of being followed by a double character, has returned. The double’s ability to know where he is and what he is doing fills William with dread and gives the reader a sense of foreboding now that the figure has disappeared. The double, even in its absence, is inescapable.

William is powerless to escape the pursuit of his alter ego, because the scope of this paranormal figure, made, perhaps, somehow from William’s imagination, conscience, and disturbed, over-active mind, is limitless. There is no earthly place that William can find that is not immediately accessible to the rival.

So far the two Williams have shared a balance of love and hate and never crossed the line into dangerous violence – they seem to value each other’s presence too much to risk harming the other, but the tables are starting to turn, which forebodes that something might happen to get the balance back.

figure, but covered in blood. As the figure comes to meet him, he sees that it is also the other William, and when he speaks, it is as if he himself is speaking. In a voice, no longer a whisper, he tells William that he has murdered himself.
THE MURDERS IN THE RUE-MORGUE possible moves not evident before the player. He wins by identifying himself with the opposite player and often can tell what moves are about to be made.
This is similar to whist. Whist is known for being a superior game for an analytical brain. Even the best chess player in the land may find that his talents at chess are only helpful when playing chess, but a good whist player will find that the skills that allow him to succeed at whist, allow him to solve many of life’s problems. The superior whist player, the analyst, is able to not only retain information and play by the book but infer hundreds of things from other places, the opponent himself, the exterior conditions, anything. It is this ability to observe beyond the game and be creative that defines the perfect player. He has an intuition for all the physical and emotional changes of the opposite player and therefore is able to tell what is a trick and what is genuine.
Being ingenious is not the same as being an analyst. An analyst can always be ingenious but an ingenue will sometimes not have the faculty for analysis. The two share a similar character, but creativity shows itself differently in each, as mere fancy or true imagination.
The narrator tells us that this discussion will be relevant to the story to follow and now introduces us to Auguste Dupin, his friend, with whom he is spending time in Paris, a man of high class and family but who has lost a lot of his fortune in a series of events. Books are now his highest luxury. This is a love he shares with the narrator and their first meeting was at a library where they bonded over a special volume. The narrator is surprised at how well read Dupin is, and judges that his company during his stay in Paris will be very valuable. So the pair live together, and the romantic but “grotesque” house that they can afford with their combined fortunes seems to suit their mood.
The narrator tells us that if you could observe their daily routines, you’d think the pair suffered from madness. They kept completely to themselves. Dupin especially was obsessed with night time, and soon, the narrator feels the same way, and even in the day, they recreate the darkness and atmosphere of the Parisien night, keeping their shutters closed. In this false night, they write and read, and then when real night came, they jaunt around town.
After the headline punch of the title The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the narrator’s very long-winded description of the logic of games and the analytic mind is a strange twist. He skillfully explains the differences between terms of intelligence, showing how creativity triumphs over methodical thinking and concentration. By using games to show these intricate mental differences, Poe distances us from the traditional content of the Gothic murder story.

In this story, Poe exaggerates this quality of analysis, making it seem like the most sought-after quality of intelligence, higher even than the flair of an ingenue. This is one of the ways that Poe begins to play with our expectations.

Dupin is a fascinating specimen of a character and the narrator treats him with great curiosity and respect. Dupin is a mass of contradictions, very intelligent and educated but with strange whims and eccentricities at the same time, so we are not quite sure how to take him and neither is the narrator. The description of the house that they set up as their bachelor pad in the city is typical of Gothic atmosphere.

Dupin’s influence is strong, and soon the narrator is following his eccentric patterns and living a night-owl life. This obsession with darkness and undercover living suggests danger and we suspect that the pair might attract some mysterious goings on.

The narrator comments that Dupin has a particular analytic ability and enjoys using it while they are out, observing the human specimens around them. He believes he can see right into a man’s soul. The narrator doesn’t want to be misunderstood, this isn’t a mystery story about Dupin’s character, he is just using it an example from their recent strolling to illustrate Dupin’s astuteness.
Both parties are deep in thought, when suddenly Dupin interrupts with a comment strangely matching the narrator’s, about a “little fellow”, who would do well in a sort of freak show. The narrator tests him, and Dupin guesses absolutely correctly that the narrator was thinking about the figure of Chantilly. Dupin then explains how he did it. He says first that it was the fruit-seller they ran into earlier in the street that brought him to the name. The narrator doesn’t believe it, though he starts to remember the fruit-seller, who had nearly knocked him down behind a basket of apples.
Next, Dupin explains the series of events that lead him to think of Chantilly. The narrator says of this trick that it is just as if he himself has retraced his steps and his thoughts. After the fruit-seller, the narrator had tripped on a flagstone and looked down. Dupin knew he was thinking about the stones, and then they reached a newly paved street and the narrator had said to himself “stereonomy” to describe the pattern. Dupin knew then, that the word stereonomy would connote the idea of atomies and theories of Epicurus, and the next logical step would be to think of the most recent space theorist, Dr. Nichol, and look up towards the constellation Orion.
Now for the final flourish, Dupin knows that the actor Chantilly recently got a review, in which the reviewer discusses his change of name from shoemaker to actor along with a Latin phrase that means “He has ruined the sound with the first letter”. Dupin knows that this refers to the change of Urion to Orion, and also knows that if the narrator was to think about Orion, which he did by looking up to it, his mind would have taken him this route, to Chantilly’s stature.
Though the narrator claims that this is not a story about Dupin’s passions, we are made to be very intrigued by Dupin’s unusual gifts and in light of the exhaustive description we have just heard in favor of the creative, sensitive mind, Dupin’s sensitivity alerts us to his superiority.

Dupin begins to reveal himself to be more than just a set of eccentric habits. He has the ability to see the narrator’s thoughts, even thoughts that appear to be steps removed from the scene at hand. This supernatural sense gives Dupin the upper hand and we see that the story revolves around his analytical sensitivity.

The description of Dupin’s process of detecting the narrator’s thoughts is long and complicated but Dupin doesn’t seem to put any effort into it, it comes naturally to him. This gives him a very special, intellectual power. Poe's stories often put a man of reason into a supernatural situation that overwhelms him. But Dupin seems to have a mind that combines reason and sensitivity in a way that can understand deeper mysteries, because it is itself mysterious.

This is one of the only instances in the story that we are given a glimpse into the narrator’s mind. Unlike many other Poe stories, this narrator seems to exist only to relay the story of Dupin. But as we know Dupin’s intelligence to be the kind that perceives and observes character, he illuminates the narrator’s intelligence here, which we can see is also quite developed.

Remember all this was just an example of Dupin’s skill. Now we skip to the evening in question, when they are absorbed by a report in the paper of two “extraordinary” murders of a mother and daughter at a house on the Rue Morgue. After some awful shrieking heard in the property, police and neighbors broke in and as they ascended the stairs to the fourth floor, heard some roughly spoken phrases and found complete disorder in the apartment, lengths of human hair lying bloody on the floor, two bags of money and some jewels on the floor. The mother was nowhere to be seen and the daughter was found lodged in the chimney by extreme force. A little later, the old woman’s body was found outside, with her throat cut so violently that her head was detached.
In the next day’s paper, the testimonies of various witnesses are described: some agree, such as that the old woman sometimes gave fortunes for a living, and that the pair had quite a bit of money saved, and that they kept very much to themselves and were hardly seen out. But most of the witnesses say slightly different things about the voices that were heard as they were approaching the scene. A policeman describes the shrieks as coming probably from two people, one rough, one much more shrill, and thought the former could have been French. Others believe they hear an Italian voice, others assume a foreign tongue, are unable to translate.
The testimonies paint a picture of the house as being very difficult to get access to. The young woman’s chamber was locked from the inside, and the windows locked too. Everybody is confused, including the police. There does not seem to be a single piece of evidence of the murderer. The follow-up article reports another search, but no further evidence found, and one man called Le Bon arrested but without much reason. Dupin seems very interested in the process of the investigation and asks the narrator for his thoughts, but the narrator can add nothing.
The way the narrator has introduced us to Dupin sets us up for a story about analysis and riddles. He has lulled us into a slow, methodical rhythm with his explanations of chess and whist. But now the real gore of the story is revealed. This is not just a murder but an unspeakably nightmarish one, with evidence that suggests the kind of evil antagonist to more than rival Dupin’s wit.

The narrator draws attention to the disparities in the long list of testimonies. Nobody can decide on what happened or even what language was being spoken, leaving the suspects very much elusive. The description of the women is more stable between the testimonies and paints a picture of a quiet pair. Their isolation as well as the lack of other relatives and friends to care about them begs the question of what motivated the murders.

By introducing the idea of an inept police force, Poe introduces the "thorough and well-reasoned" intellect, in contrast to Dupin's sensitive analysis. Such mundane thorough reasoning can do nothing in the face of the inexplicable. Dupin, however, who treats the whole thing like game, seems more confident.

Dupin says that the crime cannot be judged on the inept way that the investigation has been carried out by the police. He says that the police operate with diligence and thoroughness, but when these qualities don’t suit the situation, then the police miss the point entirely. He compares it with Vidocq, a detective who often looked at things too closely and missed the bigger picture. Dupin says that by viewing a star in one’s peripheral vision, thereby letting its radiance affect you, a far truer picture of the star is gained.
Dupin suggests they enter into an investigation of their own, for amusement if nothing else, but also the Dupin knows the suspect Le Bon and owes him a favor. He gets permission from the Prefect of the police and they go directly to the Rue Morgue. Dupin pays careful attention to the environs of the house. They enter and go up to the chamber. Everything original to the crime scene is still in place. Dupin looks over everything, including the gruesome bodies. They examine the scene until nighttime, and then Dupin visited a newspaper headquarters. Afterwards, Dupin is silent until the next afternoon.
Dupin then asks the narrator whether he noticed anything peculiar in the newspaper report. He emphasizes the word ‘peculiar’ in a way that somehow spooks the narrator. Dupin goes on to say that the paper has not presented the extremity, the unusualness of the murders. He believes that the murders seem impossible to solve to the police, because of the lack of motive and their extreme brutality. But these very factors could be used to the advantage of a detective – it is where the situation deviates from the ordinary, that gives reason a way to solve it, he claims. He advises looking at the unique aspects of the crime, rather than what appears before them.
Dupin tells the narrator that he expects to be met by someone who is in part responsible for the crime. He says the man is probably largely innocent but he hopes the man will prove to be the key to the riddle. He gives the narrator a pistol to use should the meeting demand it. Next Dupin goes ahead and explains his reasoning.
Dupin’s description of the creative technique of looking at a riddle employs a metaphor of a star, which expands the visual scope of the story and compares the crime to a kind of beautiful object. And note that Dupin is not motivated by a need for justice—to him the crime does seem like a beautiful object, a fun puzzle. He stands at a remove from the crime.

Dupin’s involvement in the crime scene is not clear cut or official; he has several different interests. He alludes to a history with Le Bon, even though Le Bon is said to be innocent. He also has enough respect from the police to be allowed to investigate the crime scene and potentially undermine the police’s efforts. The figure of Dupin has a double life, one official and one underground, which are both in play here.

Throughout all the horrible descriptions of the crime scene, Dupin keeps his cool and analyzes the situation carefully but creatively, which leads us to trust him and gives the narrator a sense of calm and safety.

Poe uses a theatrical technique in planting a gun in the scene, introducing the potential for explosion and death that builds the suspense. Dupin’s manner, which is both focused and unpredictable, also creates a sense of unease that builds the suspense of the scene.

First, the question of the voices heard. Dupin says that the voices couldn’t have been the women and the murders could not have been self-suicide because the old woman would never be strong enough to jam her daughter’s body up the chimney. Also, the voices heard were foreign, but none of the witnesses could confirm the origin of the shrill voice – only one thing is common in all the testimonies, that the voice was foreign to their own language. Having conveniently gathered statements from diverse nationalities, it seems that this voice must be quite exotic indeed, if it seems foreign to everyone. Dupin admits that an Asian or African accent has not been disproved but that adding up all the comments of the testimonies leads him to believe that the language of the “shrill” suspect is something beyond even the far reaches of the world in terms of its foreignness.
Dupin says that this discovery about the voices leads singularly to the suspicion he is now entertaining, but he won’t let on what that suspicion is just yet. He goes on to analyze the exits of the apartment. He knows that neither of them believe in the supernatural, so the material boundaries of the room must have been crossed in a material way. He goes through each means of entry and escape. First, both doors into the apartments were locked, and the chimneys are too narrow for something larger than a cat to pass through, so the only available option left are the windows.
Dupin says that they must not be deterred by how impossible this option looks. Each of the possible windows is locked and stopped with a nail. It seemed impossible to open them. Seeing these details, the police had abandoned the windows, but Dupin knows that one of them must open, and endeavors to find out some auto-locking device of the windows, since the criminal could not have fastened them from the inside, having escaped. He searches, and finds a spring mechanism that explains everything. The nail in the first window is intact and could not be replaced from the outside, so he knows the criminal must have escaped through the other window, where he indeed finds has a broken spring.
Every piece of evidence collected from the scene and the witnesses now seems to point ominously towards something stranger than an average criminal, which gives the investigation an added element of horror. Even Dupin, with his exceptional skills, is only human and his physical strength would be no match for a criminal with superhuman abilities. Also, so much of Dupin’s method depends on talking things through, thinking, contemplating and finding the logic of the puzzle, but the criminal’s unintelligible tongue warns him that communication might be impossible.

Though the clues seem to point to a superhuman criminal, Dupin insists that it can all be explained solely by looking at the material possibilities of the scene. The narrator’s admiration for Dupin is quite clear. He presents his companion as completely in control of even this mysterious situation, to the point that Dupin creates the suspense himself, keeping the identity of his suspect and suspicion hidden.

Amid the gore of the crime scene, the focus of the narrative turns to a tiny practical detail, a broken nail. Dupin is beginning to convince us that there might be a reasonable explanation for what happened here. This description of the window and the locking mechanism doesn’t sound Gothic or supernatural at all. In fact the ordinariness of the explanation is a little disconcerting.

The next question is how the suspect got down from the window. He sees that there is a way that one could escape onto a lightning rod near the house, if the shutters were open, by climbing out onto the lattice structure – one could also enter this way. But Dupin is eager point out the extreme difficulty of this move. Not only has the suspect got an unintelligible language but also an astonishing physical ability. The narrator feels like he almost understands what Dupin is getting at, but the moment passes.
Dupin is now concerned with the interior of the apartment. Obviously, the women’s belongings are strewn and drawers looked to have been emptied of certain things, but Dupin is not so sure. We know that the women were reclusive and wouldn’t have need for expensive or many clothes. Also, money that the banker said the old woman had recently withdrawn has been left in the room. The police have looked to this withdrawal because it occurred so close to the time of the murders but it is a complete red herring. There is no motive in this case.
Now with all this is mind, Dupin draws the narrator’s attention to the method of the crime, the extreme force of both the murders. He asks him to imagine the strength of one who can push a body into a chimney. And also, the human hair that was found at the scene, were found with clumps of blood and flesh that also imply that they were taken up with extreme force. He goes on to explain that what had looked on the body of the old woman like an injury from some kind of weapon was in fact sustained from her fall.
Dupin sums all these details up for the narrator and asks him what he thinks now. The narrator can only imagine that the deed was committed by some kind of escaped madman. Dupin admits that his suggestion is not hugely off track, but even madmen have recognizable tones and phrases in their language. To top it off Dupin reveals a tuft of hair found in Madame Esplanaye’s clutches and the narrator can tell that it is not human hair. Dupin then shows the narrator a sketch of the hand mark around the old woman’s neck and the narrator knows that it is the print of no human-sized hand.
Between the lines of Dupin’s analysis of the scene is a scary picture of an extraordinary criminal. The criminals gibberish language and superhuman strength, not to mention his seemingly remorseless violence, create a palpable sense of impending danger for the narrator and even Dupin.

The traditional methods of investigating a murder fall short in this case. Motives, like robbery or revenge, are proven to be irrelevant here – this paints a picture of a criminal who is beyond the law and unmotivated by anything—a cruel-blooded killer.

Now added to the athletic ability of the murderer, the lack of motive and his unintelligible voice, this superhuman strength completes the impression of a figure that not even Dupin will be able to outwit.

Poe effectively keeps the narrator in the dark just as we are being kept in the dark. As Dupin gradually, step by step, makes his case to the narrator, we are put in his shoes, and feel like we are in the midst of the situation. Dupin uses suspense as if he is telling a story too, choosing to tell the narrator that the criminal is non-human before explaining what kind of non-human, so that all the possibilities (paranormal or not) go through our minds.

Dupin shows the narrator an excerpt from a Cuvier text about the Ourang-Outang, whose described anatomy and strength match the crime perfectly. He goes on to the question of the voices. The Ourang-Outang certainly fits the description of the shrill, unintelligible voice, but there is one other, thought to have uttered gruff French phrases at the time of the neighbors' intrusion. Dupin decides that there must be a Frenchman involved, who perhaps tried to follow the ape but escaped when he saw the horror. So far, these things seem like profound, educated guesses, but if Dupin is correct, then the Frenchman will be looking for his missing creature. Dupin has put an ad in the paper, saying that the ape will be returned (to the Maltese sailor it belongs to) upon identification.
The narrator wonders how Dupin knows already that the sailor is from a Maltese vessel. Again, Dupin has made a series of educated guesses, having found a ribbon on the lightning rod outside that he recognizes as being used by Maltese sailors and knotted in a Maltese fashion. He thinks that no harm can come of placing the ad – either the sailor will assume that the writer has made an error about the Maltese vessel or he will see himself described perfectly. And he will be sure to answer the ad, in order to protect his innocence.
They hear someone enter, and they ready the pistols. They hear the sailor come hesitantly up the stairs and knock on the door of the chamber. The man has a sailor’s appearance, muscular and hardy, and greets them in a French accent. Dupin pleasantly invites him in and compliments him on the species that has brought him here.
The sailor seems worried when Dupin asks how old the animal is. He says he can’t be sure. Dupin pretends to have stored the animal nearby and to be sorry to say goodbye to it, but the sailor, eager to get the animal back, says he is prepared to offer a handsome reward. Dupin chooses for his reward to know everything possible about the murders. He has begun pleasantly, but these words come as a threat, and he produces his pistol. The sailor is suitably terrified but Dupin calmly assures him that he trusts he is almost entirely innocent of the murders, but that he surely knows a great deal more than the police and it is his responsibility to tell all he knows – there is more sense in honesty than concealment.
The revelation of the Ourang-Outan as the long-awaited answer to the riddle is a bit of an anti-climax, having been lead to believe by Dupin’s suspenseful storytelling that the criminal was a paranormal figure. Yet seeing all Dupin’s puzzle pieces fit together flawlessly makes him look even more impressive and unusual himself. In the absence of a superhuman threat, Dupin becomes the exotic specimen. The wide range of his expertise is shown here. We are reminded that he reads voraciously and has many areas of knowledge to draw upon when making his analysis.

Dupin’s often reclusive existence in Paris, secretly policing the streets, is paired with a broad, worldly knowledge, but we know very little about Dupin’s past and the origins of his insights are mysteries. Though the focus of the investigation is this sailor, the focus of the narrative again turns to Dupin and the enigma that surrounds his unusual qualities.

The placement of pistols in the scene, and the gradual approach of the sailor, heightens the suspense, but Dupin’s cordial tone and the strange release of this pent-up tension when he reaches the room is a disconcerting twist.

Dupin’s abilities to be both poetic and mathematical also correspond to a contrasting set of manners. Dupin can easily switch between kindness and menace in a way that makes us distrust both postures. He has sympathy for the young sailor and knows how badly he wants to be absolved of the crime but in order to get the truth from the sailor he needs to judge the conversation perfectly and use just the right amount of cruelty in his tone.

The sailor tells his story, how he voyaged to Borneo, and with a shipmate, captured an Ourang-Outang, but the shipmate died and left him alone with the ape. With much care, he lodged it with him in Paris, but one night, after the sailor had been out drinking, he returned home to find the beast out of its cage and imitating his shaving routine. He tries to whip the Ourang-Outang, but this only frightens the animal and it escapes. A chase ensues for hours, until, very late, the sailor comes to the Madames’ apartment and sees just what Dupin foretold – the ape entered the room using the lightning rod. The sailor followed but got stuck on the rod and could only peer into the room at the catastrophe inside. He witnessed the whole event, each scream of the mother and daughter frightening and enraging the animal more, until it spotted its master and guiltily concealed the bodies, one in the fireplace and one out of the window.
The narrator adds a few closing remarks. The sailor later recaptures the Ourang-Outang and sells it for a good price, and Le Bon is released from prison. The Prefect of the police knows he’s been beaten, but he’s obviously quite annoyed at Dupin’s skill. Dupin knows that the Prefect’s wisdom is shallow but that he is a “good creature”, and ends with a condescending quote about the Prefect’s main skill, “to deny what is, and to explain what is not.”
THE TELL-TALE HEART
The narrator defends his sanity – he says he is nervous, but that he can not be called mad. His senses are in fact quickened, and he is more alert and has heard things from both heaven and hell. He admits that his motives for the act to follow are curious, that there was no passion that provoked it. Instead, it was a strange feature of the old man he lives with, that one of his eyes was different from the other and had an evil, vulture-like appearance, which convinced him to kill the old man so that he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.
The sailor’s version of events and Dupin’s analysis of what happened line up perfectly. A vivid image of the secret lodgings of the Ourang-Outan are conjured in the sailor’s story and continue the idea of the furtive Paris streets after dark enjoyed by Dupin and the narrator. It is a world away from the police’s daytime scrutiny of the crime scene, which yielded nothing and brings a disturbing excitement to the gruesome story.

The final passage of the story brings back the narrator as the storyteller. He has been displaced by the persuasive voice of Dupin, but it has been the narrator’s eyes through which we have seen the events. The story ends with a summing up of the lessons learned which makes it sound retrospectively like a moral tale, but Dupin’s light touch and cutting humor save it from fitting in to a traditional structure.

The narrator starts by protesting his sanity but such a forceful declaration immediately raises suspicions that he might be misleading us or under an illusion. His inexplicable hatred of the old man’s eye and his fleeting, bizarre mention of heaven and hell create an impression of an eccentric man, who may not be as aware of his own sanity as he claims.

thinks we must suspect him of madness again, but we will be dissuaded when we see for ourselves the methodical, patient way that he goes about the murder. For seven nights, he creeps to the old man’s bedroom door, opens the latch, puts an unlit lantern into the room and carefully puts his head in after. Then he opens the shutter of the lantern so that a single ray falls on the eye. Every night, he is annoyed to find the eye closed, because it is its stare that gives him his motivation. The next morning, he always calls to the old man and asks him how he slept.
On the eighth night, the narrator is particularly gleeful about his sneakiness. He marvels at how the old man knows nothing of his plan. He even laughs a little to himself. But then he thinks he hears the man stirring, but he goes on, gradually putting the lantern inside, knowing that the room is pitch black. But he slips and the lantern chimes and the old man calls out.
For an hour, the narrator keeps very still and can sense the old man is awake, listening for intruders. The narrator says he knows what this is like. And then the old man lets out a groan, and the narrator recognizes this too, as a sound that comes straight from the soul. The narrator sympathizes but still feels like chuckling. He imagines what the man has been going through since he awoke, trying to explain away the noise and comfort himself but in vain because he feels that Death is in the room.
After a while, without any change to the old man’s obvious alertness, the narrator opens the shutter a tiny bit and emits a ray upon the man, and sees that the eye is open! The narrator's old fury is stirred at the sight. The narrator reminds us about his quick senses, and begins to hear a dull speedy ticking, which he knows to be the sound of old man’s frightened heart. The narrator keeps still but the heart beats faster and louder. A terrible anxiety seizes the narrator. The heart’s sound increases by the second, until the narrator cannot stand it any longer and rushes into the room with the lantern and pulls the old man onto the floor and kills him by dropping his own bed onto him.
The narrator seems to think that a person can only be mad if they aren't methodical. But his methodical efforts to kill an old man because he doesn't like the man's eye is crazy! That he needs to actually see the eye to commit the crime makes him seem even crazier. Poe increases and increases the suggestion of madness that he planted at the start of the story.

The narrator’s chilling laugh, his inability to act until he sees the eye open and his pleasant tone with the old man each morning, combine to make an impression of the narrator as a madman.

The strange thing about this rivalry between the narrator and the old man is that it is not really hateful. The narrator seems to have a lot of sympathy for the old man. In fact he knows exactly how scared the old man is, having felt the same mortal terror before. But the narrator’s sympathy is perverted by his strange hatred of the old man's eye.

The narrator describes the sight of the eye and sound of the heart as if he is really seeing them, and ascribes the violence of his reactions to his naturally sensitive senses. But Poe engineers the scene so that we suspect that the narrator’s disturbed mind is inventing these terrors and acting self-destructively. The sound of the old man’s heart could well be the sound of his own heart, getting louder the more anxious the narrator becomes.

him. He paces the floor, until he loses control entirely and confesses everything, telling the men to tear up the floor boards and that they will find the beating heart.
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

The story begins at the moment the narrator is sentenced to death at the time of the Catholic Inquisition. The narrator listens to his sentence in a dream-like state, watching the sinister movement of the judges’ lips and the swaying black drapes. Then his senses
Poe uses the real-life nightmare of the Catholic Inquisition to place his narrator in plausible mortal terror. He adds his own brand of supernatural sensations and visions to the historical detail, making the Inquisition doubly Gothic and mystical. cut out, and he is filled with a shock-like sensation and the figures around him turn into angel-like ghosts. He faints. ground so that by following the wall, he will find the scrap again and know the cell’s perimeter. But on his way, he slips and falls into another strange slumber.
When the narrator wakes, a pitcher of water and some bread has been placed beside him. He is so hungry and thirsty that he devours the offering without questioning its source. Then, he resumes the tour of the prison wall, and overall, adding together the steps before his faint and after, he makes the perimeter 100 paces. He finds it impossible to guess the exact area of the cell however, because the walls are jutting and irregular. He now aims to find his way across the cell. He inches his way across the floor but soon trips on the scrap of fabric and falls.
As the narrator lands and comes to, he realizes that he is in an extremely precarious position – he is inches away from the edge of some kind of chasm. He loosens a small chunk from the edge and lets it drop and, hearing its descent for several second, knows that the death that had been planned for him was a gruesome one. He has heard about this kind of torture from the rumors of the Inquisition dungeons. He makes his way back to the wall, now imagining numerous other pits dotted across the prison floor.
Eventually the narrator sleeps and when he wakes, another pitcher and loaf has been left. He drinks and thinks the water must have been drugged because he falls into a deathlike sleep. When he wakes yet again, the cell is visible from a light coming from somewhere. He can now see the full size of the cell. It is much smaller than he imagined from his pacing. He realizes he must have counted the room twice over, going back the way he’d come after his fainting spell. The cell is also not so irregular as he’d imagined. The alcoves and juttings that he’d felt must have been enlarged by his sensory deprivation. The walls are hideously decorated with menacing figures.
The narrator now realizes that while asleep he has been put on a wooden board and strapped down. There is some very aromatic meat beside the board, but no water this time and he is unbearably thirsty. It is now that the prisoner looks above him and sees that on the cell’s ceiling, the figure of Time has been painted, holding a pendulum. As he looks closer, he sees that the pendulum is moving, in a slow sweep.
The idea of the narrator’s enemy is stirred again. The fact that the narrator can’t see or know what kind of creature is tormenting him makes the situation even creepier (to him and to the reader). In the darkness, all actions are anonymous and the cell’s owner can do anything without the narrator’s knowledge. The irregularity of the dungeon also exaggerates the idea of the unknown.

This pit is a symbol of the deep unknown realm that the Inquisition has created. The rumors of the Inquisition’s torture methods are reigning over its prisoners. It's not even clear whether this room is a cell, or that the pit has an end – it could well be bottomless. In this place, there seem to be no rules.

The transformation of the light in the cell implies a presence outside and some kind of vent or entrance, or at least some kind of source – but this source remains a mystery. Even though the narrator can now see the size of the cell, this outside source now arrives to torment him. He is in the hands of his captors, who are controlling his experience of the cell, and moreover control his mind by drugging him and generating strange effects of the mind so that as readers we are never sure what version of the truth we are getting.

Before the narrator was tortured by not being able to see. Now, as he is forced to watch the pendulum descend slowly toward him, swing by swing, the narrator is tortured by being able to see. The narrator’s self control has been removed entirely and he is literally in the hands of the enemy.

is mesmerized by this motion for a minute but then gets distracted by some huge rats that have entered the cell apparently from the well in the center. When he looks back to the ceiling, he is shocked to find that the pendulum has descended. Its weighty metal blade is sharp as a scythe, and he knows that though he has avoided the well-known doom of the pit, he know must face the pendulum.
The narrator describes the torture of waiting for the pendulum’s slow descent, for days, it seems. One moment, he wishes for it to descend quicker so he can meet his end, the next moment, he struggles to free himself from his restraints. Suddenly, he feels a strange sense of calm, and then the narrator faints again. He wakes paranoid about being watched and sick with hunger, even knowing his impending death. As he strains to reach the meat beside his wooden board, a glimmer of hope occurs to him, a fleeting thought of joy. He struggles to capture this thought but finds his mind is useless with fear.
The narrator watches the pendulum swaying back and forth, directly over his heart. He contemplates how the blade would cut through the fabric of his robe, forcing himself to imagine the thrill of feeling the rip. The pendulum keeps coming, down and down, and with each motion, the prisoner’s emotions vary and he laughs and panics alternately in his frenzy. Each time he feels his nerve fight back against death—it is hope that keeps him going. Hope occurs to him again as a half-formed thought.
The rats are ravenous and have already eaten up the portion of meat beside the narrator’s bed. Along with the movement of the pendulum, the narrator lets his hand wave over the empty plate and the rats nibble at it. An idea occurs to him. He wipes the oily residue from the meat along the bandages that restrain him. The rats are slow at first but soon hundreds of rats are upon him, eating through the bandages. The scythe is now almost touching his skin but he manages to duck out of its way at the last moment.
Between the downward motion of the scythe, the awful presence of the pit and the scuttling rats, the narrator lies helpless. By creating the scene in this way, Poe focuses everything on the narrator’s mind, as the only outlet he has left, so we become very intimate with his thoughts as he faces death.

The narrative follows the twists and turns of denial and acceptance of impending death. What seems a very unnatural circumstance, produces a very natural human response and it is witnessing the human condition awaiting death that causes horror and impatience for the reader. Poe’s use of the psychological side of horror is very effective in bringing a new level of fear to the Gothic mystery genre.

The pendulum is both a weapon and a time-keeper. It is a symbol of the destruction of time, and the threat of death, which is a recurring theme in Poe’s work. As the pendulum swings, the rhythm mimics the incessant beating of the narrator’s heart and forces him to imagine an end-point when time will stop, when he will die.

The rats’ devouring of the narrator’s meal forces us to imagine what they will do to his body when he is dead. The rats fuelled only by their desire to eat. But again, the narrator shows his ingenuity and uses the rats to his advantage just in time. In each of these narrow escapes, Poe pushes the narrator right to the last possible minute or inch, pushes him to the bring of death.

Responding to the narrator’s escape, the pendulum machine stops moving and rises back up to the ceiling, and he knows that his every move is being watched. He looks suspiciously around the cell. He notices that something has changed and tries to distinguish what. It becomes clear that the strange light is coming from a small gap between the wall and the floor going around the perimeter of the cell. He tries in vain to look through it.
There has been another change in the room – the fiends and demons on the walls are now much clearer and brighter. The walls are glowing with these figures and the whole room is full of that metallic light. The atmosphere is quite unreal. Suddenly, the plans of his captors becomes frighteningly clear – the walls are closing in on the narrator. As they get closer, the sensation and smell of heat emanates from the glowing walls. He knows that he will be pushed into the pit, and begins to wish for any death but the infamous pit.
The prisoner tries to withstand the pressure of the closing walls but soon he barely has an inch to stand on. When there is nothing more he can physically do, his spirit lets out a final, mournful scream into the pit. As he lets go and is about to fall to his death, the sound of trumpets wakes him. The walls retreat. He is saved! A man enters, General Lassalle, who has come from the French army. They have defeated the Inquisition and the nightmare is over.
THE BLACK CAT
The narrator begins by saying that we probably won’t believe what he is about to tell us. But he assures us that he is not mad, and because he is about to die the next day, he wants to recount to us these “household events” that have caused so much terror. He suspects that to some people, the events will seem commonplace, and their horror will be explained away with logic and science.
The dungeon transforms according to the narrator’s movement and the narrator interacts with it as if it is the enemy. Poe fills these walls and dimensions with a kind of human consciousness giving them a terrifying insight into the narrator’s fears.

The antagonist in this nightmare remains unclear. The narrator’s faceless foe, the Catholic Inquisition, is represented by many threats all at once, the demon faces on the wall, the strange light, a mysterious source of heat, the walls closing in, and behind all of these dangers, the sensation of being watched reminds us that there is a more tangible human presence running the show.

It is rare for Poe to bring his narrator to safety at the end, but in this historical tale, the Inquisition is overcome and the mysteries of the pendulum and the pit are swatted aside by the strength of the French. Yet that did not make the narrator's brushes with imminent death any less overwhelming or exhausting. And while the French have abruptly saved the narrator from the inquisition, somehow there is little joy in it, and no celebration. Perhaps it is because, while the French have saved the narrator from this death, they can't, of course, save him from eventual death.

Poe uses this foreshadowing message to increase the sense of horror for what is to follow. We already know that the narrator is on the brink of death, so the fact that the events are domestic and logical makes them even more real and horrific. Horror and the mundane household often come together like this in Gothic literature.

tells us of his boyhood, which was easy. He had a particular love of animals and had a lot of pets and this love only increased into adulthood. He thinks there is something in the loyalty and unselfishness of a dog that you can’t get from a man. But the narrator did marry, and was lucky to find a wife who appreciated his love of pets, and filled their house with a host of them, including a black cat.
This cat was unusually large and intelligent. The narrator remembers how his wife used to talk about the superstition that black cats are all witches in disguise, but he assures us that this is unimportant to the story. He just remembers the detail. Anyway, the cat’s name was Pluto and became a favorite of the narrator, following him everywhere. This special bond lasted several years.
Meanwhile, though, the narrator’s mood became progressively worse. He drank a lot and suffered from bouts of very bad temper, in which he even lost patience with the animals, and even with Pluto. One night, drunk, the narrator returned home, and imagined that Pluto was avoiding him. This sent him into a fit of rage, and, he is ashamed to write it, he attacked the cat and gouged out one of his eyes with a quill pen.
In the morning, the narrator felt horrible about the cruel act. The cat’s eye socket healed, but he now knew to avoid the narrator and their bond was lost. At first, this loss saddens the narrator but that feeling of regret gives way to anger and perverseness. He explains this word, perverse. It is a natural phenomenon in human beings, to do the thing that one knows is wrong just because it is wrong. It is this phenomenon that the narrator uses to explain his attack on the animal, and in the spirit of perverseness, he also commits a further act, and hangs the cat from a tree. He cried as he did it. He knows that this sin places him beyond the reach of mercy.
The set up of the story is nice and friendly. The narrator’s childhood sounds loving and the description of his love of animals paints a picture of a kind household, full of life. But because of the introduction, we know to be suspicious of this happy family scene.

The narrator zooms in on the cat, Pluto. Though he assures us that his wife’s superstitions are unimportant, the mention of them increases the sense of foreboding we already have for the titular black cat.

Note how the act of violence is particularly directed at the symbolic eye, which Poe often uses to show the supernatural spirit or soul. But there is also another symbolic act at play here – the weapon that the narrator uses is a quill pen, a writing tool, suggesting both the power and the violence that Poe feels towards the written word.

The narrator is tormented by his own mind. It is not the cat’s behavior that provokes his feeling of perverseness, it is his own disordered mental state. This is an interesting take on the traditional Gothic genre: adding psychological explanations to the mix, such as the description of perversity, creates the opportunity for the reader to sympathize with the narrator, that isn't traditionally a feature of Gothic tales of past eras.

That very night, the narrator and his wife were awoken by the sound of flames. The house was on fire. They escaped but they saw all their possessions go up in smoke. The narrator resigned himself to despair. He says that he does not try to prove a series of causes and effects but that he must relate a chain of facts. He went back to the house the day after the fire and sees that all the walls have caved in except for one. It is the part of wall above the head of the bed, and now has a crowd of people around it. Going closer, the narrator realizes that within the wall, there is a shape in relief, of the murdered cat.
The narrator tries to logically explain how it could have happened. The cat must have been thrown into the window when people saw the flames and gotten stuck to the recently plastered wall and been preserved there by the compression of the other walls and the substance of the plaster. But though the narrator believes he has explained the incident, he still gets terribly paranoid about seeing the vision again. He gets an urge to find a replacement animal.
One day, in a den of disrepute, the narrator suddenly spots a cat atop a barrel of alcohol he’s been staring at. The cat is large and looks almost exactly like Pluto apart from a white patch on its breast. The narrator starts petting it and finds it very responsive to his touch. Soon, the cat is very attached to the narrator and won’t let him leave without him. He takes it home, and soon the cat becomes a favorite of the narrator’s wife, but, much to his surprise, the narrator finds a loathing growing within himself for the animal’s unwavering affection.
The narrator starts to avoid the creature, partly out of this hatred but also from shame at the way he had treated his last cat. He also hates a particular coincidental feature of the cat: that it too only has one eye, though this only endears the cat to his wife. As the narrator’s loathing for the cat increases, so does the cat’s affection and it springs up on the narrator unawares, looking to be petted, attaching itself with its claws. The narrator, at these moments, wishes he could destroy the animal, but stops himself because of the traumatic memory of Pluto but mostly because of his dread of the new cat.
Poe plays with the idea of the power of a disturbed mind. The fire is such a violent coincidence that it seems to have been caused by some supernatural power: like the narrator’s rage, or perhaps the cat itself. The coincidences continue as the outline of the cat appears in the only piece of the building not destroyed by the flames. It is impossible to separate the disturbed vision of the narrator and the reality, because we know his mind is guiltily obsessed with the image of the cat.

The battle in the narrator’s mind between delusion and reality rages at this point. He tries desperately to explain what he sees with rational thought, but his mind is already infected with superstition and his explanations begin to sound far-fetched and somewhat insane.

The den setting is filled with alcohol and other substances that provoke illusions and hallucinations. By putting the narrator in this setting, Poe introduces another level of mistrust in our intimacy with him. How far can the narrator be trusted, when the arrival of Pluto’s double is a product of these mind-altering drugs and dark, shady atmosphere?

Poe brings out his doppelganger technique again. The features of this new cat coincidentally make him an exact replica of the murdered Pluto. Now this animal presents the narrator with a bigger challenge – an supernatural (or possibly imaginary) rival is much more difficult to get rid of than a real one. The narrator now battles with his own delusions as well as his violent moods.

tries to explain that this dread is not because of the apparent evil of the beast, but of the strange transformation of the patch of white on the cat’s breast into the shape of a gallows – it is merely a cat, yet it is his most haunting image, and has caused him somehow to be writing from “this felon’s cell.” The image of the gallows terrifies the narrator. He mourns that such a beast can get the better of a man like him, “made in the image of a High God.” Now he can get no rest, because the cat is all over him in the day time and the nights are filled with bad dreams.
In this state of permanent torture, all the goodness that the narrator had in his heart has disappeared. His evil instincts take over, and even his wife is feeling his fury. One day, they go to visit their old house on an errand, and when the narrator sees the new cat has followed him he swings an axe at it, but his wife stops his arm. In a rage, he strikes his wife in the head with the axe and kills her. His mind turns immediately to how to dispose of the body. He considers cutting it up, digging a grave in the cellar, but decides that the best way is to hide the body in the wall of the cellar.
The narrator's plan works. He removes the bricks covering the fireplace, and puts the body in and covers it again. He works hard to replace the wall and recreate the scene just as it was and in the end is satisfied that nothing is amiss. Then the narrator determines to find the cat so that he can at last rid himself of its presence, but he finds it absent for the first time. The sense of relief is extreme. The cat doesn’t appear for the whole night and for the first time since its arrival, even with the murder of his wife on his hands, the narrator sleeps soundly. For three more days, this bliss continues.
The narrator’s turn of phrase in this passage is illuminating. By comparing himself to a high God, and therefore superior to other animals, he confesses his delusions of grandeur. He believes that the world is against him and a lot of the visions that we see appear before him, the doppelganger animal, the gallows, the cat in the wall, can all be attributed to this inflated sense of importance.

From the first attack on Pluto, the narrator’s evil deeds multiply horrifically, each one breeding the next. All trace of remorse is gone. Now the narrator cold-bloodedly focuses on concealing the body of his wife, without any sign of grief or of ever having cared for her. Poe uses the domestic environment to amplify the horror – just as the narrator warned at the beginning of the story, the household is now home to murder. In fact, the very walls of the family home are used to hide the bodies.

After the intense activity of the narrator’s plan to hide the body in the wall, the silence in the cat’s absence is strongly felt. It is the quiet before the storm. We as readers know we have not heard the last of it because the narrator has not been found out (we already know that he is in prison as he writes this). Though the narrator sleeps soundly, Poe keeps up the suspense for the reader.

triumphant. The narrator is suddenly faint as the police quickly uncover the corpse inside the wall. It has already started rotting, and on top of the gory figure of the narrator’s wife, sits the cat.
THE PURLOINED LETTER the situation, if they swear secrecy. He goes on to explain that an important document has been “purloined” from the royal apartments.
The Prefect then cryptically suggests that he knows that the person that stole the letter still has it, because of a certain lack of fallout that would definitely occur had the letter passed out of the robber’s hands. The letter, he says, has the power to bring scandal to a certain person of high honor and give the person with the letter great power. The Prefect reveals that the thief is a Minister, who snuck into the royal bedroom and accosted the royal lady and seeing the contents of the letter, blackmailed her. He then stole the letter, in her full view, and replaced it with his own replica document. Dupin notes that because the royal lady is aware of the theft it gives the thief power over her. The Prefect confirms that the thief has been using this power. Helpless, the lady has come to the Prefect desperate for help.
The Prefect explains what has been done so far in the investigation, and Dupin comments on the police’s habitual thorough investigations. The prefect says it was necessary to search the Minister’s apartment, and this could be quite conveniently done because of the Minister’s frequent absence at night, and because the prefect is in possession of a master set of keys for the city’s properties. He has therefore been engaged in this search for three months, refusing to quit – a handsome reward awaits the finder of the letter.
The narrator asserts that it might be possible for the letter to be hidden somewhere other than the Minister’s apartment but the prefect is sure that it is not, because the letter holder’s power depends on being able to destroy it at a moment’s notice. The narrator assumes that the minister is not carrying it with him, and the prefect admits that the police have already stopped and searched him.
Dupin thinks they should have known that the Minister would be too clever not to expect to be stopped and searched. The prefect says that though the minister is not a fool, he is a poet, which is a very similar thing. Dupin admits that he too is a bit of a poet.
Poe paints a world of corrupt royal hierarchies and abuses of power. The Prefect, who is considered thorough but simple and uncreative, is in charge of the safety of the most high profile figures in the country. The Minister, who should be protecting the royal family, is seeking to use them for his own ends. And the man who can solve the case is Dupin, an eccentric poet.

The police attack the case head on. They search the apartment, over and over, more and more carefully, refusing to quit. The police are living up to Dupin’s criticism and the narrator’s introductory description of the methodical but uncreative mind.

The prefect seems to be in possession of every advantage in this case. Not only is the Minister conveniently absent for long portions of the day but the police are also given ample opportunity to search the man himself. And yet they can find nothing.

The Prefect’s idea of poetry being equal to foolishness is a significant misconception that bothers Dupin – whose revered intelligence is said to be both poetic and mathematical, just like the Minister (establishing the minister as a kind of double to Dupin).

The prefect describes his method of investigation, how he looked over every inch of the apartment. He knows very well how to uncover “secret” spaces, like parts of drawers blocked off, and chair legs that have been hollowed and stuffed with wadding so that the wood seems to have the same density. They studied every rung in the hotel with a microscope to detect any hint of dust, and then the bedclothes and every item of furnishings, and then scrutinized the walls and surfaces of the house in the same way. They did this not just to the minister’s building but to the two adjoining buildings too, and the paved grounds.
The narrator is astonished, but the prefect again reminds him of the large reward. The narrator asks if he checked every single document in the minister’s library, and the prefect assures him that they did, and not only that, they checked between every single page of every volume. When the prefect is done with his exhaustive list of investigated areas, the narrator thinks that it must follow that the letter is not after all within the apartment. The prefect agrees. He now asks Dupin for advice but all Dupin can say is to search the apartment again. He asks if the prefect has a description of the letter itself, and the prefect eagerly gives one in minute detail from a notebook. He then leaves, feeling at a loss about the whole case.
The prefect returns the following month and, when asked about the purloined letter, is disappointed to admit no further developments. He made another thorough search but found nothing. Dupin asks how much the reward is and the prefect says that he will personally pay fifty thousand francs to anyone who can bring him the letter. Dupin suggests that there are still further avenues of investigation to go down, and mentions a man called Abernathy, a physician, who, when asked by a miser what to take for a hypothetical condition, told him to “take advice”.
The prefect disregards Dupin’s story but says that he is serious about the reward. Dupin then calmly asks the prefect to write him a check, and when he has it, he will hand over the letter. The narrator and the prefect are in shock at this turn of events. The prefect writes the check for fifty thousand francs, and Dupin, true to his word, produces the letter. The prefect is overjoyed and rushes off immediately.
The police have searched literally every square inch of the Minister’s apartment. The long description of each process in the search goes into microscopic detail. The direct and systematic way that the police are able to carry out their search removes the story for a moment from the idea of crime – danger seems far away.

At this point the prefect needs Dupin to give him advice but Dupin only tells the prefect to keep doing what the police have already unsuccessfully tried. Knowing how superior Dupin’s analytical mind is, his dismissal of the prefect with so simple a suggestion shows the humorous side of Poe’s detective story.

Dupin is completely in charge of this situation. Even though he gave the prefect lousy advice the last time, the prefect returns, showing how dependent he is on Dupin. Dupin’s response is cryptic and condescending.

Though Dupin’s manner seems silly and mysterious, the prefect trusts him, and writes him the requested check without questioning his methods. Dupin shows his creative intelligence by understanding and predicting the prefect’s behavior as well as the Minister’s.

Dupin then explains himself to the narrator. He says that he had faith that the police would do a completely thorough search of the apartment, as far as their methods allowed. But this method is not suited to the criminal in question – the prefect has been both too shallow and too deep in his search. Dupin gives an example to illustrate his point. He reminds the narrator of a schoolboy game, where one boy conceals marbles in his hand, and the other must guess whether it is an even or odd number of marbles. One boy that Dupin once knew was a master of this game because he knew how to predict the other boys’ behavior according to their intellect.
The boy claimed that he mimicked the other boy’s expression and in doing so, found a natural kind of sympathy for the boy’s thoughts and intentions. Dupin compares the schoolboy to famous thinkers like Machiavelli.
So, the accuracy of the guess depends on the accuracy with which the opponent is judged. Dupin says that the police only think about what they would have done in the situation, where they would have hidden the letter, and this is only accurate of a kind of average, Prefect-like intelligence and not of the more unusual kind of the Minister. Their problem is they never adjust their approach, they only exaggerate it, as they did by searching the house over again. By assuming that the letter can be found by something as basic as searching, they are completely disregarding the acumen of the criminal.
The Prefect’s short sightedness is also down to his perception of the Minister as a fool, because he is a poet. All fools are poets, says Dupin, but it does not necessarily follow that all poets are fools. The narrator remembers that the minister is a renowned mathematician and wonders if Dupin has misattributed the title of poet, but Dupin claims he knows the man well, and he is both mathematician and poet. If he were only a mathematician, he wouldn’t have been able to reason so well, says Dupin. The narrator thinks this is a strange theory. It is completely contrary to popular opinion about mathematics. But Dupin responds with a French phrase about how inconsequential an idea’s popularity is.
One of the most unlikely and intimidating factors of Dupin’s intelligence is his understanding of many different kinds of people, to the extent that he seems to inhabit their minds. But his sympathies also allow him to see genius in unlikely places, this child on the school playground for example. This sensitivity to displays of intelligence in many walks of life is significant in making Dupin seem more human.

There is something about the mind of a criminal and minds themselves that fascinates Dupin. This passion and his unusual sensitivity and sympathy for other minds makes him an intimidating character, because he fills neither the role of detective nor the role of criminal, but somewhere in between or both at once.

This is an interesting part of Dupin’s character. His identification as a poet and a mathematician as well as his obvious ability to tell a good story and create suspense likens him convincingly to Poe himself. The concept of poetry and methodology is what makes up a successful horror story, whose plot must be flawless but creative enough to deceive.

Dupin explains that he finds fault with forms of thinking that are not abstractly logical. He thinks math is only concerned with shapes and quantities, which are truths of the relation of one thing to another, rather than the true quality of things. In a book called ‘Mythology’, the author discusses the phenomenon where myths are remembered and referred to as if they are real. And the mathematician does this with the theories and equations he holds true, and will listen to no other mode of thought.
Dupin returns to the Minister. He knows that, because the minister has fooled the Prefect, he has the abilities of a poet as well as a mathematician, and understood everything that the police were likely to do in response to his crime. Dupin believes that his absences from the apartment were deliberate, and that he knew the prefect’s train of thought and knew to avoid any kind of concealment of the letter.
Dupin reminds the narrator what he said to the prefect when he visited, about the riddle being too self-evident. He believes that the material world and the metaphorical world are strongly connected. He uses two examples. The first is the principle of inertia being the equal in physics and metaphysics. The second is a game where one player asks another player to find a name on a map, and the clever player will choose an overarching county name or some other broad term that is stretched across the map or placed high up on a sign. Most people expect that the many-lettered, or obscure names will be most difficult to find, but it is often the simplest answer that can be overlooked, just like the case of the purloined letter.
The more Dupin considered the intelligence of the Minister, the more he believed that the best way he could invent of concealing the object beyond the scope of the prefect’s usual search, but also to keep it handy so he could destroy it at a moment’s notice, was to not conceal it at all. With this idea, Dupin says that he went to the Minister’s apartment himself, and performed his own search.
Dupin summons the arenas of poetry and mathematics, the scope of mythology and the detail of geometry, so that the range of his knowledge seems limitless. And unlike many other figures of influence in Poe’s Gothic stories, Dupin’s knowledge has been gained by worldly means, reading widely and learning, which makes an interesting contrast to the paranormal side of traditional Gothic literature.

Dupin’s understanding of the Minister’s techniques shows that he understands the mind of a criminal, which gives him a certain threatening power which he wields throughout the story, just like in Murders in the Rue Morgue. We are made aware that Dupin could probably quite easily commit some crimes himself.

Dupin displays his skill in this speech. He shows us how he is able to consider deep concepts and human observations at the same time, and consider many dimensions and levels of meaning at once. While thinking of the academic realm of metaphysics, he also conjures a simple image of a map and the visual effect of the important names of counties and so on being spread across the terrain.

Even the most obvious deception fools the police. In fact, the best way to fool them is not to hide anything, to expose the crime completely. This makes the police force seem laughable and Dupin, with his own agenda, takes the lead by himself.

Dupin mentions that if you saw the Minister at home, you’d think him one of the laziest men in the world, despite his reputation for being energetic. Dupin, wearing dark glasses so that he could look freely about the apartment, searched the documents lying about, and then noticed a card rack, with several letters in, one of which was very crumpled and used, with the Minister’s seal on it. Dupin knew this was the famous letter, even though it differed so radically from the one the Prefect described. In fact, it looked so much like a deliberate ploy to mislead, that Dupin was sure that the Minister had fashioned it to dupe the police, whose methods he knew to be both shallow and thorough enough to overlook such a clue. Dupin stayed for a long time, pretending to be engrossed in conversation, and saw that the letter’s edges were chafed – he could tell that the letter had been turned inside out, and resealed.
Dupin purposely left a gold snuff box on the Minister’s table so that he could return to retrieve it the next day. During this second visit, their conversation is interrupted by the sound of a pistol shot and frightened voices, which of course draws the Minister to the window. Dupin takes his opportunity to take the letter and replace it with a replica he had prepared. He tells the narrator that he had planted the gunman outside for this purpose.
The narrator is unclear why Dupin replaced the letter, rather than just stealing it. Dupin explains that the Minister is a bold man with a lot of support around him, so he may have killed him if he learned the truth. Also, Dupin is eager to get revenge for the royal lady, by transferring the political power to her – this can only be done if the Minister is unaware that he no longer possesses it. Dupin comments that it’s a popular view to think that it is easy to fall into moral ruin, but he has no pity for the fallen.
It is humorous how opposite Poe has made the two searches, the police search and Dupin’s, of this apartment. The police searched for months on end, every chair rung and bed sheet, while Dupin enters the room and within an hour or so spots the letter. This shows how in line Dupin’s mind and the Minister D___’s mind are. It furthers the notion that they are rivals or in fact doubles. But though they share the same kind of intelligence, Dupin is coming out on top – he is able to see the Minister’s tricks before the Minister realizes that Dupin is investigating.

Dupin uses indirection to trick the Minister, who was himself a master of indirection. Dupin bests his rival.

Dupin’s motivations come into focus in this part. His goal is not so much justice as it is a quest for revenge and success. It is difficult to sort him into a category of good or bad. His morality seems to follow his analytical mind, he favors sense and rationality but also his emotions.

digne de Thyeste,” which translates to “So baneful a scheme, if not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes.” This is from a story by Crebillon about a pair of brothers, who both wrong each other.
THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

But besides these things, the ball is a magnificent event. It is all designed with the Prince’s eccentric taste, combining the disgusting and the beautiful, which is so bold that it is almost grotesque. Some think he is mad.
Through the suite, “dreams” pass through, writhing and following the colors and sounds of the room, freezing with each chime of the clock, and moving again as the chime ends. But to the last chamber with the black drapes, none of these masked dreamers go. Here, the chime of the clock sounds solemn and loud, whereas in the other, brighter rooms it has a merry sound.
The colorful apartments are full to bursting, and the party goes on feverishly until the strike of midnight, when the music and dancing uneasily comes to a stop and the dancers fall into their strange reverie. Then there are twelve further chimes. Before the chimes die away, the crowd becomes aware somehow of a new presence in the suite. The rumor of this presence travels through the rooms and the company becomes collectively fearful.
What kind of figure must this be to cause alarm even in such a strange party? Even in the most reckless person, there is always something that will touch his sensible side, and for Prince Prospero, this figure does that. The figure is completely masked, from head to foot, as if dressed for the grave. Within the crowd, the rumor grows and they become sure that the figure, stained with scarlet, is the Red Death itself.
The figure moves slowly among the waltzers and starts to shake with rage as he sees Prince Prospero. The Prince, also enraged, orders the man to be uncovered and hung from the battlements. His words ring through the seven chambers. The group around him begin to approach the figure, but no one wants to seize him, and so he is able to stalk right up to the Prince, and past him, through each room, to the violet room. Then the Prince, angry at his own cowardice, quickly follows the figure and draws a dagger from behind.
The disgusting and beautiful images are brought together in the Prince’s curation of his Imperial Suite. Like other Poe characters, the prince pulses with life, but with a kind of grotesque self-aggrandizing life.

The architecture of the scene represents the Prince’s character and the final seventh room foretells a dark fate. The strange behavior of the masked dancers show how in tune they are to the rhythm of the apartment’s music and the uneasy passing of time.

Midnight is a well-used hour in Gothic literature – its position between night and day and the magic associated with it makes these twelve chimes a superstitious significance. The revelers are drunk with this mystic atmosphere and the rhythm of the clock keeps them moving in this elaborate show of denial. But when this dream is broken, the sensation that they have been avoiding attacks them all at once.

The Prince has formed an image of himself as an unbeatable, superior creature, above even death. So the deathly figure that now approaches is immediately associated with death itself. The mask is now a sinister object, reminiscent of grave shrouds and bandages.

Prince Prospero’s authority and personality are threatened for the first time here and a battle of wills ensues. The unknown masked character is bent on the Prince and the Prince on him, and the Prince’s exuberant party-throwing skills are nothing to the threat of death. Now the layout of the suite comes into play and captures the Prince in a trap of his own design.

go out, and the Red Death finally rules over the whole realm.
THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO nitre-covered wine-storage vaults. Fortunato won’t hear of it, and takes the narrator by the arm, covering him with his strange cloak.
They arrive at the narrator’s house, which is empty of servants, as the narrator had expected. He had told them to stay in the house, but he had said that he would not return till morning, so he knew that they would have broken their word as soon as he left. He fetches two torches from the walls and goes right down, through the levels of the house, to the vaults below. As they walk toward the Amontillado, Fortunato begins to cough from the damp clinging to the walls. The narrator says they should go back, as he does not want Fortunato to get sick, but Fortunato denies that his cough is serious and demands that they go on.
The narrator suggests they drink some Medoc to protect them from the elements. Fortunato proposes a toast to the buried remains that surround them in the vaults, and the narrator proposes one to Fortunato’s long life. They journey further and further into the catacombs. The narrator explains that his ancestors, the Montresors were a large, wealthy family. Fortunato asks what the family crest was, and the narrator describes a fancy arrangement of a gold foot stamping a serpent who has bitten it, and the motto ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’, which means “No one can harm me unpunished”. Fortunato is pleased with this motto and the wine is making him giddy again. It is affecting the narrator too.
The narrator describes how the nitre is increasing as they go further in. They are now under the river bed, and there are bones and remains all around them, dripping with nitre. He suggests they take another drink. Fortunato empties the bottle and then lifts it in a strange symbolic gesture, which he explains is from a brotherhood, the masons. The narrator insists he too is one of the masons, and produces a trowel from under his cloak as his symbolic gesture. Fortunato is puzzled by this joke but they continue on, deeper and deeper, in search of the Amontillado.
They come to the entrance of a dark crypt. Inside the crypt is another enclosure, narrower, and three of its walls lined with human remains and the fourth wall exposed and its bone decorations thrown down before it in a pile. Through this entrance is yet another recess which is completely dark and, the narrator says, leads to the innermost vault where the Amontillado is.
The narrator has used reverse psychology on his servants, manipulating them in the same way that he manipulates Fortunato. The scale of the narrator’s deception comes into focus. He has arranged the whole thing. Now, the solitude of the Palazzo and the vulnerable position of Fortunato heightens the suspense. Furthermore, Fortunato’s persistent cough and the confinement of their underground path to the Amontillado is a constant reminder of death.

Wine is an important symbol in this story. Not only does it provide the narrator with his motive for bringing Fortunato down to the vault, it also shows us Fortunato’s obsession when he repeats the word “Amontillado.” It also provides the arena that these two men compete in – wine represents wealth and legacy as well as knowledge and sensitivity. And to top it all off, the wine creates a condition of drunkenness that slows the wits and quickens the emotions – perfect for the narrator’s manipulations to be successful.

The dank catacombs under the river, with nitre dripping from the walls, is a very Gothic setting. Fortunato remains oblivious to the narrator’s plans. The narrator’s comment that he too is a mason is a dark joke—the narrator is not a member of the masonic brotherhood, but he does plan to act like an actual mason when he walls Fortunato up alive in a top.

Poe ramps up the Gothic atmosphere even further, with tombs within tombs, accessible only through narrow corridors. The final room is the most extreme dungeon.

The narrator mentions Luchesi again, but Fortunato is determined to go ahead. He disappears with his torch into the recess and reaches the end, which is stopped with a rock. Quickly, the narrator grabs him, and chains and locks him to the stone wall. He again draws Fortunato’s attention to the nitre and tells him to go back, but Fortunato is obviously stuck now and responds in his frenzied voice with
‘Amontillado!’
The narrator now goes to the pile of bones and digs about until he finds some building materials hidden there and he starts to build a wall blocking in the recess. As he goes, Fortunato begins to make sorrowful noises and the narrator knows that the man is no longer drunk. He builds row after row of bricks until seven rows are in place. Now in the dim glow he can hardly see his captive. Fortunato begins to scream horribly. Suddenly worried Fortunato will be able to pull himself free, the narrator checks the recess with his sword, but the strength of the stony walls satisfies him. He joins Fortunato in screaming, mockingly echoing his terror, until Fortunato falls silent.
The narrator expertly uses his rival’s own vices to carry out his plan, so that it hardly seems like manipulation at all. It is Fortunato’s own jealousy of Luchesi, his competitive spirit, and his eccentric passion for Amontillado that makes him step into the innermost vault. The narrator enacts his revenge still without any explanation for why he is doing it. He simply does it, quickly and cleanly. Fortunato’s first thought, meanwhile, seems to be for the wine, further reinforcing his obsession with it.

The fact that the building materials are all ready shows just how carefully the narrator has planned this revenge. When the narrator pulls his sword to check the strength of the wall it is a reminder that he has been carrying a lethal weapon this whole time. He could have killed Fortunato in seconds. That he did not, that he chose to bury Fortunato alive, shows how important the game of torture is to this narrator’s revenge.

At midnight, the narrator has almost finished the wall. There is just one brick to place, but as he begins to slide it into position, Fortunato emits a low laugh then speaks in a sad voice, complimenting the narrator on a very impressive joke, but asks when he will be let out, because people are waiting for him. The narrator repeats Fortunato’s phrases without answering his questions, but when Fortunato again falls silent, the narrator calls out his name. The narrator is disappointed when Fortunato does not respond. Now feeling ill from the damp, the narrator drops his torch into the recess and place the final stone to close the wall. He then puts the pile of bones in front of the new wall. It is now half a century later, he tells us, and they have not been touched. He ends his story by saying ‘rest in peace’ in Latin.
The narrator’s carefully plotted game comes to its height, and the narrator seems to relish in not responding to Fortunato’s despair in any meaningful way. And yet, when Fortunato goes silent, the narrator is disappointed. In this way, Poe engineers an unexpected twist to the murder–the sadness and emptiness that comes for the narrator when Fortunato disappears behind the bricks. Unlike Poe’s other murderers, the narrator here is successful in his crime. But his quiet disappointment in the moment of that success raises the question of what the narrator will live for now that he has had his revenge.