The Murders of Rue Morgue

Reading "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" reinforced my fascination with murder mysteries. The way that the narrator presents the information as a continuation of his fascination with Dupin surprised me, as I was expecting more examples of the excellence of Dupin in tracing the narrator's train of thoughts.
After changing my focus from the peculiar characteristics of these madmen to the "extraordinary murder" in the paper, I was again shocked by the state of these two women. The horrendous state of their corpses, from being forced up a chimney to having her throat sliced open, suggested an act of revenge upon these seemingly innocent women.
With the events of the night of the murder, the narrator then lists the information given by each of the witnesses or 'friends' of the L'Espanayes. Each character seems to have a different opinion on the accent of the man with a shrill voice. This seems to be an accurate representation of the narrator's claim that often the police focus on the unnecessary details of a case which prevent them from making accurate conclusion.
After each character's statement, the narrator once again returns to his fascination with Dupin's process of analysis. The narrator watches as Dupin studies the house and the victims.One interesting thing I noticed about Dupin is that he is always asking others their opinions over the situation or their observations while never offering anything in return. This is perhaps a tactic that detectives use to gather intel before making an assertion of his own.

Comments

  1. I think that the accent or voice of the shrill person was important because it is what helped Dupin to recognize that the person was not actually a person at all. I do agree with your statement that detectives gather intelbefore they make their own assertion. I think they do this to have as much information at their disposal as not to leave anything out or miss a piece of information.

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    1. I agree that detectives try to gather as much information as possible before they commit to an assertion or a hypothesis about who committed the crime and how it happened, however I find it a really interesting duality that information is instead oftentimes withheld from the audience in mystery stories. This I assume is a result of the crime/mystery being a part of a narrative that needs to keep its reader reading. At least, this has been my experience with the Dupin series so far.

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  2. I thought the analysis of the voices was interesting too. It seemed really long to begin with, and then you see how this ties into his point of the police over-analyzing whatever information they have.

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