Who understood Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe?

Question

I need a TYPICAL average no big worded, kind of definition, i read it almost a hundred times and it still confuses me!

Answer 1

I don't blame you for finding the story difficult going. Having been written in 1841, the language is a bit obsolete, and Poe often has a tendancy in his works to talk for long periods of time about obscure and not entirely relevant stuff.

At its heart, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is one of the earliest detective stories. As a matter of fact, there are those who accuse the creator of Sherlock Holmes of essentially stealing many of his ideas from this story!

Like Sherlock Holmes, the main character of this story is an independant and retiring intellectual who is well-schooled in the observation of facts and has an uncanny ability to get to the bottom of things. Also like the Sherlock Holmes stories, the narrator of the stories is not the detective himself, but a friend who tags along and observes the main character at work.

I don't think the narrator even mentions his own name. Nor is it really relevant. It is C. Auguste Dupin who is the real interest of the story. Dupin has just enough money to be able to live without work, which allows him to spend all his time in the intellectual pursuits that he says provides him with a great deal of pleasure. Even so, when a mysterious murder occurs, it is not until an innocent man is jailed that he develops enough interest to intervene.

The story, like many good mysteries, present us with a lot of information about the crime which doesn't seem to make any sense. A room locked from the inside but from which a murderer seems to have nonetheless escaped (a theme which would become a staple for mysteries later on). Witnesses who completely disagree about what they've heard. Yet we know these all make sense SOMEHOW.

Dupin explains, in classic deductive reasoning, how he figured out what happened at the scene, and then lays a trap for the man involved, which of course works flawlessly. The key to Dupin's method lies in what Holmes would later coin as an expression: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains - no matter how improbable - must be true."

In this way Dupin discovers that the windows in the murder room are trick windows, simply because they are the only way the murderer could have used to escape. And because events in the crime MUST have required super-human strength and agility, he concluded that the being that committed the crimes was quite simply not human. And, with a few other overlooked clues, the answer is clear - the crime was committed by an escaped orangutan (I put a link below if you want to see what orangutans are like) and was witnessed by its keeper.

The keeper is absolved of all guilt and even goes on to turn a profit by selling the creature. Dupin (in traditional mystery style) gets both a thanks and a brush-off from the police who are embarassed at being outdone by an outsider. And Dupin goes on to solve crimes in two other stories by Poe, and at least six others who try to imitate Poe's style with the character.

Hope that helps! Enjoy!

Answer 2

My admired Poe short tale is The Pit and the Pendulum, as a results of fact it develop into exciting to be how human beings react while they could actually do no longer something yet look ahead to dying, and how desire is often there, even in the face of pop Time, or the bleak reaper. "and then there stole into my fancy, like a prosperous musical word, the thought-approximately what candy relax there could desire to be in the grave." I additionally reallllly enjoyed The tell-tale heart, it entertained me to no end. The previous guy and his extraordinary eye form of creeped me out, however the way the murderer have been given the previous guy to believe him involved me. Quote: "i develop into never kinder to the previous guy than in the time of the full week formerly I killed him." How ironic. My admired poem of his is The Raven, and that i somewhat enjoyed, The masks of the purple dying besides, alongside with the autumn of the domicile of Usher. I observed Usher carried out in a play while i develop into in grade college, which began my interest in Mr. Poe. My admired quote of his era is "confident myself, I seek for to no longer convince," from Berniece.

Answer 3

Be honest: You didn't read it once, did you now?