Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
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Short Story By Flannery OConnor
| suspense. Dupin’s manner, which is both focused and unpredictable, also creates a sense of unease that builds the suspense of the scene. First, the question of the voices heard. Dupin says that the voices couldn’t have been the women and the murders could not have been self-suicide because the old woman would never be strong enough to jam her daughter’s body up the chimney. Also, the voices heard were foreign, but none of the witnesses could confirm the origin of the shrill voice – only one thing is common in all the testimonies, that the voice was foreign to their own language. Having conveniently gathered statements from diverse nationalities, it seems that this voice must be quite exotic indeed, if it seems foreign to everyone. Dupin admits that an Asian or African accent has not been disproved but that adding up all the comments of the testimonies leads him to believe that the language of the shrill suspect is something beyond even the far reaches of the world in terms of its foreignness. Every piece of evidence collected from the scene and the witnesses now seems to point ominously towards something stranger than an average criminal, which gives the investigation an added element of horror. Even Dupin, with his exceptional skills, is only human and his physical strength would be no match fora criminal with superhuman abilities. Also, so much of Dupin’s method depends on talking things through, thinking, contemplating and finding the logic of the puzzle, but the criminal’s unintelligible tongue warns him that communication might be impossible. Dupin says that this discovery about the voices leads singularly to the suspicion he is now entertaining, but he won’t let on what that suspicion is just yet. He goes onto analyze the exits of the apartment. He knows that neither of them believe in the supernatural, so the material boundaries of the room must have been crossed in a material way. He goes through each means of entry and escape. First, both doors into the apartments were locked, and the chimneys are too narrow for something larger than a cat to pass through, so the only available option left are the windows. Though the clues seem to point to a superhuman criminal, Dupin insists that it can all be explained solely by looking at the material possibilities of the scene. The narrator’s admiration for Dupin is quite clear. He presents his companion as completely in control of even this mysterious situation, to the point that Dupin creates the suspense himself, keeping the identity of his suspect and suspicion hidden. Dupin says that they must not be deterred by how impossible this option looks. Each of the possible windows is locked and stopped with a nail. It seemed impossible to open them. Seeing these details, the police had abandoned the windows, but Dupin knows that one of them must open, and endeavors to find out some auto-locking device of the windows, since the criminal could not have fastened them from the inside, having escaped. He searches, and finds a spring mechanism that explains everything. The nail in the first window is intact and could not be replaced from the outside, so he knows the criminal must have escaped through the other window, where he indeed finds has a broken spring. Amid the gore of the crime scene, the focus of the narrative turns to a tiny practical detail, a broken nail. Dupin is beginning to convince us that there might be a reasonable explanation for what happened here. This description of the window and the locking mechanism doesn’t sound Gothic or supernatural at all. In fact the ordinariness of the explanation is a little disconcerting. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2017 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 38 The next question is how the suspect got down from the window. He sees that there is away that one could escape onto a lightning rod near the house, if the shutters were open, by climbing out onto the lattice structure – one could also enter this way. But Dupin is eager point out the extreme difficulty of this move. Not only has the suspect got an unintelligible language but also an astonishing physical ability. The narrator feels like he almost understands what Dupin is getting at, but the moment passes. Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
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