The Purloined Letter Essay

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Intelligent serial killers, blood-splatter analysis and justice killing; Dexter is a fascinating modern television show with a character so abstract and antisocial when compared to most television programs today, many wonder where James Manos could have thought up such a character. After reading Edgar Allen Poe’s, The Purloined Letter, one can see that there are striking similarities between the misanthropic Dupin and the morose Dexter. I believe that James Manos’s main character Dexter, in the television series Dexter, is strongly influenced by Edgar Allen Poe’s main character Dupin, from much earlier 1844 short story, The Purloined Letter. The characters most striking similarities run from their difficulty connecting with their peers to …show more content…
The only time that he is able to hold human interactions is when he is solving crimes for the local police force, yet even then he struggles to properly communicate with his fellow detectives. “The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning in merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity”(Poe, pg. 1607). Dupin talks with a high level of intellect in his word choice. In this complex statement while he is talking with the narrator, he is simply saying that the thief have left them clear evidence at their finger tips, all they have to do is have the mind set of such a clever thief to find the letter. The police force Dupin is working with however, are not creative enough to think outside the box. They are being too logical and straightforward about the facts at hand. If they were able to be more creative in their thinking they would see that while the minister has left them a fairly strict pattern, he is not simply a mathematician or man of strict guidelines. Dupin continues by saying “…he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect” (Poe, pg. 1609) This is Dupin’s polite way of saying that the police did all that they …show more content…
Where many are not able to think clearly because they value human life or the possibilities that everyone has, Dexter is able to see the evil within and the unjust actions they have committed, and provide the justice that the criminals deserve. This is an action that is deeply engrained in him, and the one time Dexter begins to reflect human’s emotions, he is quickly able to turn it around. “I could have killed Arthur Mitchell the first chance I got” (Manos, Season 5, Ep. 1) Right after the death of his wife, Dexter realized that the side he was trying to suppress, the side that was able to decipher the justice these murderers deserved had been pushed down to far inside of him. He had finally gotten himself to conform to the world around him when he came to the conclusion that the world could not function is he did not give justice to those who were doing wrong.

Dexter Morgan is a reimagined, twenty-first century C. Auguste Dupin. Although they have very different backstories, Dupin and Dexter are two characters with extremely similar character traits. Their difficulty to communicate and form relationships to the people around them allows them to form a unique way of thinking about the tasks at hand. These exclusive thought processes set them apart from most other works both in the mid-1800s and the present twenty-first century. By noticing the striking similarities

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