The Murders In The Rue Morgue And The Purloined Letter Analysis

In Poe’s detective stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin serves as a model of rational deduction. Dupin seems to have almost supernatural deductive ability in solving mysteries. Since Dupin’s use of reason to solve mysteries is central to these stories, determining Poe’s views on the nature of reasoning is critical to an understanding of their meaning. Hurh (2012) argues that the description of Dupin’s dual nature of “the creative and the resolvent” (Poe, 1841/1975, p.144) alludes to an analytical method called “the regress” (p. 471, 476). This analytical method has two components: composition, which involves “[moving] from the causes to understand the effects,” and resolution, which involves “[moving] from the effects to seek a cause” (Hurh, 2012, p. 476). …show more content…
I argue that Poe uses the metaphor of vision to express his ideas on effective reasoning by composition and resolution.
In “The Purloined Letter,” the search for the letter reflects the process of resolution. Dupin, in explaining his reasoning states that his deductions are “the sole proper ones and that the suspicion arises inevitably from them as the single result” (Poe, 1841/1975, p. 156). Through this comment, Poe asserts that correct analysis can lead only to the sole true conclusion. The practice of resolution is thus the search for the single correct explanation of the evidence among the many alternatives, just as Dupin and the police search for the true location of the letter among all possible places it could be hidden. Dupin and the police, though, use different