Ascent From the Maelstrom Depraved

Ascent From the Maelstrom

Depraved Narrators in the Works of Edgar Allen Poe

Many of the works of Edgar Allen Poe take us into the deepest and darkest recesses of the human mind. Luckily, we are usually privileged to have as our guide, a narrator who is intimately familiar with these gloomy, gothic caverns. The way down to despair is hard enough, but the way back up... is such a journey even possible? Poe's protagonists rarely take that risk. Few among us would dare risk a night in the asylum. Turn the pages of a Poe tale and you are following, step-by-step, the logic of the weak of mind. This is not to say that a feeble mind is an unimaginative mind. Nor is it one unaccustomed to the exhausting work of difficult thought. Poe's "heroes" reveal to us the disturbing fact that a mind can be lost through overuse - ponder too profoundly and the thoughts you think might come a little too fast. The engine of the intellect might overheat, and break down. Push it too much, and the machine could end up beyond repair - seized and immobile, like a car without oil. Pleasant musings are the lubricants of the healthy mind. They let us relax. They give us time to understand and to regroup. Edgar Allen Poe's narrators present us with a terrible choice... But a choice nonetheless, an opportunity that we might either take or forego. But then again... can one ever trust the insane?

The Cask of Amontillado is narrated by a man who at first appears to be completely sane. It is only in retrospect that the reader discovers the true nature - and designs - of Montresor. Amontillado is a tale of deception. Fortunato is lured to his doom by the promise of a "reward" - the cask of Amontillado. The grim vaults, the festival costume, even Poe's choice of names for his characters - all are clever clues to the dark undercurrents of Montresor's murderous mind. Poe is a master at juxtaposition. In this story, as in so many other of Poe's works, we have the confusion of life and death; of death with life, and temporary rewards with final rewards.

Poe, the inventor of the mystery story and an early expert at the art of horror fiction, was a simultaneously bereaved and traumatized child. I doubt that he ever recovered from his mother's death. Shock interfered with Poe's mourning. The mourning interfered with his attempts to process the shock. The upshot was that Poe never escaped the effects of his beautiful mother's death.

Terr 99)

Thus, the "insanity" of many of Poe's ideas regarding life and death, and the blurring of the line between them. Only a madman could conceive of killing Fortunato in such a ghastly manner, but by being taken into Montresor's mind, we suddenly realize that his thoughts are logical. Montresor is a rational man reaching an irrational conclusion. We do not know what horrible "slights" the narrator suffered at the hands of Fortunato, but we are led to believe that, whatever they were, they sincerely merit such a punishment. Fortunato is the "Fortunate One," in two very different ways. In the first instance, his end is so gruesome as to make him almost one of the most unlucky men of all time. In the second case, as we understand from our trip through his murderer's mind, Fortunato's death is decreed by fortune - it is fated. From the moment that Fortunato begins his fatal journey into the vaults, there is nothing that will save him. Montresor's mad design has been worked out to the slightest detail.

As well, Poe's heroes frequently have an obsession with death on quite another level. The "beautiful" is confounded with the "terrible." Normal, sane emotions, such as the instinct to self-preservation, become perverted by the rational adoption of an irrational rationale. In the Tell Tale Heart, the Protagonist is obsessed with the idea that the feeble old man who is his employer, is in reality, a baleful influence that must be destroyed. Detecting nothing in the old man's actions, or words, the Narrator must look beyond the obvious. Settling at last on the old man's eye, we are treated to what appears to be a level-headed explanation for the "danger" that the old man represents.

In Poe's horror tales, the sensational nature of murder and its aftermath give rise to individual energies that always threaten to verge out of control. Regardless of how careful the murdering protagonist has been in the commission of his particular crime, passion usually overwhelms intellect.

Magistrale 104)

In the case of this particular crime, the "logic" is once again the logic of an insane man. The Servant takes for granted the idea that there is something evil about the old man, whether it something that is under the old man's control or not. To arrive that the conclusion that the old man is, in effect, possessed of the "evil eye," is a perfectly sane explanation... If you believe in the evil eye. By the same token, the beating heart that eventually gives the killer away is the logical manifestation of some, deeply buried concern of the murderer's i.e. that he might just be wrong, and that there was nothing "evil" about the old man.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue offers another twist on Poe's obsession with the not-so-healthy of mind. Dupin is the very sane, and very rational, investigator into what comes across as a highly irrational crime. However, in his attempt to understand how such a deed could have been done, Dupin must, in essence, make his mind like the mind of the insane killer. Dupin's quest for truth reveals.

The author's preoccupation with the relationship between the mind, or rational consciousness, and the sensational influence of the world beyond the self. Constantly in Poe's fiction irrational forces and inexplicable phenomena threaten "the monarch Thought's dominion."

Kennedy 173)

Yet Murders in the Rue Morgue is a fairly unusual tale by Poe standards. The fact that Dupin is the reader's guide to the depraved mind causes us to puzzle whether it is possible to understand the deranged. If even the insane follow a certain logic, even if it is a logical that is peculiar to one individual, can we then still speak of that individual as "insane?" Many of Poe's narrators appear to be more "upset" (as in dis-arranged) in their minds then completely without any hold on the wider reality that we all share. Remarks the Narrator of the Gold Bug, "I have said enough to convince you that ciphers of this nature are readily soluble, and to give you some insight into the rationale of their development. But be assured that the specimen before us appertains to the very simplest species of cryptograph."

YOUR EDITION of POE) There are, in other words, many degrees of depravity, of which that examined in the Gold Bug is relatively minor as compared to that which is presented in the Fall of the House of Usher, or the Cask of Amontillado, for example. Greed, an elemental emotion, is the root cause of the Protagonist's "insanity" in the Gold Bug. Greed, leads to guilt, and the two, combined with an elemental force of nature - the dark - allow the Protagonist's very sane imagination to run wild.