The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Edgar Allan Poe’s detective literature may lead the reader to conclude that the author celebrated scientific pursuit above all else. However, the Dupin “tales of ratiocination” constitute an anomaly compared with many of his other famous works. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” clearly imposes the dominance of objectivity over subjectivity, which is a startling artistic departure from Poe’s Romantic works of poetry and Gothic horror. As a pioneer of the investigative genre, Poe personally stood at odds with his fictive hero’s mission toward ultimate rationality. Spotlighting this apparent contradiction between art and artist, readers discover another thematic device that Poe employs in this narrative: duality.

Owing to René Descartes, the French philosopher who defended the primacy of reason in the sciences, Poe figures his main character as the man who embodies the maxim “I think, therefore I am.” Dupin appears to think exceptionally; consequently, he is regarded as exceptional. The preface defines in a deconstructive way what it means to think. It offers two capacities: the analytic and the ingenious, or the rational and the creative. Further, it informs the reader that thinking with these capacities is not mutually inclusive. A person may possess one in the absence of the other and in differing measures. In rare cases, both are operable. With this story’s characters in mind, the mode of their thought processes will inevitably shape their identity. From this perspective, readers construct Dupin, his sidekick, the police, the neighbors, the victims, and the perpetrators in terms of their mental function. For truth to be found in the tale as well as in the characters that comprise it, the reader must be cognizant of the separations, opposing facets, and inherent contradictions within their psychic spaces. Acknowledging and synthesizing these tendencies toward duality, Poe imagines a Parisian world where one interacts with another in order to harmonize one’s identity.

Readers are initially drawn to the concept of duality through the uniting of the detective pair. Dupin and the narrator behave in a way that registers as fraternity: “[W]e sallied forth into the streets arm in arm” (4). However, the merger plants doubt as to whether the detective and narrator are indeed separate individuals or rather exist as two aspects of the same person. Before the murder case gets underway, the narrator notes: “We existed within ourselves alone” (4). In German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s 1807 work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel posits that “there must be reconciliation between self and other such that consciousness can ‘universalize’ itself through the other” (“Hegel: Social and Political Thought.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2022). C. Auguste Dupin’s interactions with the narrator appear as an attempt to pursue his own universalization. Before cementing his friendship, Dupin’s attachment to external knowledge was so complete that “[b]ooks, indeed, were his sole luxuries” (3). Therefore, he “ceased to know” others or to “be known” by them (4). It is only through reciprocity with the narrator’s personhood that Dupin achieves his sense of self.

Whether Poe intentionally rendered a binary partnership or an ambiguous whole, readers understand that for all Dupin possesses in intellectual prowess, he lacks in social appreciation. He antisocially “ceased to bestir himself in the world” and “indulges” open communication insofar as “mere self is his theme” (3). At each turn of dialogue, the narrator remains in a constant state of comparison and self-deprecation. Next to Dupin’s mental dexterity, the narrator appears deficient. He stands “upon the verge of comprehension without power to comprehend” (24). However, because he acts as an engaged interlocutor, one who hears, witnesses, and responds, he serves to co-create Dupin’s consciousness. Additionally, as situations arise, the narrator displays his sensitive and socially responsive nature as when he “pitied the sailor from the bottom of [his] heart” (31). In doing so, he models for Dupin an existence beyond the rational. One line that is literally intended to reference the sailor in the plot is thematically instructive: “I look for the man here—in this room—every moment” (17). On a deeper level, Dupin searches for himself in others continually. In function, these opposite propensities are not presented as the characters’ fatal flaws. Instead, they show the detective duo discovering in the other those underdeveloped aspects within themselves.

Piercing the veil between aspects that individuals present to the world and ones that are concealed, Poe at various points calls to mind the concept of the soul. When the narrator first encounters Dupin’s mystifying powers of perception, he states, “Tell me, for Heaven’s sake […] the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter” (5). Here, the inner and outer worlds are exposed, exhibited, and explained in detail blurring their supposed separation. The narrator recognizes the duality of Dupin’s scientific process, his volatile “moods,” but he frustratingly stops short of being able to trace and expound on its boundaries or interconnections. The narrator “often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused [himself] with the fancy of a double Dupin—the creative and the resolvent” (4). Poe’s short story projects both characters attempting to gather and reflect evidence of the other soul within themselves.

Poe also intersects duality with respect to the identity of truth. Dupin spells out that “light” can be found in darkness: “Truth is not always in a well. […] The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain tops where she is found” (15). Further, the approach to truth is not one-sided. The narrative idolizes reason yet depicts a plot progression where reason alone is not enough. After Dupin and the narrator have digested the details of the crime contained within the various newspaper articles, they determine the solution impossible without first-hand knowledge. Accordingly, the mystery is unraveled only after Dupin applies his quickened senses and tangible scrutiny to the crime scene. In total, reason without empirical knowledge is useless. Synthesis of where truth is revealed and by what means, whether externally or internally, is necessary.

Poe, having planted no clues in the text beforehand, saves the revelation of the characters in question and their motivations until the very end of the narrative. In a true act of ingenuity plus analysis, Dupin conjures a possibility into being. As creator/detective, he reasons and then speaks something out of nothing. Not only does this elicit a sense of the miraculous for the reader, but it also underscores the task of the seeker, “to prove that these apparent 'impossibilities' are, in reality, not such” (20). Poe shrewdly demonstrates the dual nature of existence by hiding what is inside what is not: the possible within the impossible.