Edgar Allan Poe's The Imp Of The Preverse

The Imp of the Preverse by Edgar Allan Poe is taken from The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. This short fiction story written by Poe was published in July of 1845, yet still can be related to discussions happening over a hundred years later. Recently there was been a lot of discussion among scholars and others alike concerning science, evolution and the human race. Poe’s story begins with a debate of whether phrenology has any understanding of the human race. There is an argument developed within the story concerning whether man’s needs are decided first and then differing developments are conceived to satisfy those needs or whether this process is somehow backwards. What starts as a evolutionary debate about the human race somehow takes a turn into telling a story of a man being …show more content…
The narrator begins with viewpoints on phrenology and whether man’s needs are decided first and then differing functions developed to satisfy those needs or whether this process is somehow backwards. It is believe within the story that there is some sort of natural thinking to do wrong for the wrong reasons, such as waiting to complete that critically important work project until we are left scrambling on Sunday night for our Monday morning presentation because we couldn’t wait until after the presentation to go shopping, out with our girlfriends or to that new restaurant. The opening of the story also sheds light on how we will know that something can or will be bad for us, but instead of the fear scaring us away, we simply keep on with the task knowing that at any point it will blow up in our face. The imp in the narrator and all of us somehow allows us to ignore those perceived fears by somehow determining that we will be the first to escape the pitfalls of our choice. We seem to tempt fate by misplacing all of our