Criticism In The Puploined Letter

The short story "The Purloined Letter" by Edgar Allen Poe published in The Gift for 1845 in 1844 is a story about crime and mystery. The story revolves around C. Auguste Dupin, a friend of the unnamed narrator and is a detective asked by Monsieur G (the Prefect of the Parisian police) to solve a recent case. While the story is told from the point of view of the narrator, the speaker and main character of the story is the detective C. Auguste Dupin. The narrator rarely adds in any of his own comments and completely trusts the detective 's words rarely questioning if at all the detective 's way of thinking. This short story follows the formal New Criticism format of allowing the reader to understand the main idea in the closing paragraphs. Although …show more content…
Poe doesn 't want the reader to focus on the small details such as the year or names. Instead, he allows the reader to fill in these small details themselves hence the "18--" or single letter names given to the other characters other than Dupin, the main character of the story (1). Even the narrator remains unnamed with no formal background information provided. While names provide a bit of information about the character, the reader may be distracted by focusing on the small details and ignoring the most important ones in the process. The only exception are the personalities of each character. One such example being "for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man" (1). As stated in the previous paragraph, these personalities allows the reader to predict a character 's next actions. However, Poe uses the reader 's newfound ability (to predict a character 's next actions) against the reader as the ending is completely different from the one the reader predicts. Except for the small subtle hint placed in the introduction, there isn 't another place that hints at detective Dupin replacing the actual letter with a non-important one of his …show more content…
The information obtained from the different elements of the story are ambiguous and can be interpreted in many different ways. The most common interpretation and the one Poe wants the reader to believe is that D -- -- is the culprit who stole the letter and that the letter must be returned to the owner. In actuality, the ending reveals that detective C. Auguste Dupin takes the real letter and leaves a fake one behind. Through the conversation between the narrator and Dupin at the end of the story, the reader finds out the real purpose behind Dupin 's actions. Only then do all the ambiguous elements of the story become clear and connect to each other pointing to Dupin as the real