Dupin's last mystery
In each story that we read involving Dupin solving a mystery, he seems to get more and more fed up with the ineptitude of the Prefect and the parisian police. If we look at the progression for “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to “The Purloined Letter” we can see that Dupin begins by helping out the police department for fun and ends by demanding 50,000 francs from the prefect in order to bail him out. While it is possible that he is still enjoying solving the mysteries, it seems like he is perfectly content to sit in his apartment with the narrator and smoke all day. It seems to me that, while playing detective may have been fun at first for Dupin, the novelty is quickly wearing off. He rants constantly about the uselessness of the police and how they have such a narrow minded attitude towards solving crimes, which suggests that he is annoyed at them, probably because they keep coming to him for help. We know that he is not a detective by trade, but just a man with a vast intellect, so he does not need to keep doing this as a job. My thoughts are he finesses this large sum of money from the prefect and is basically setting himself up to resume doing nothing for the rest of his days.
If we look at this attitude through the analogy of Poe being Dupin, it makes a lot of sense. This is a lot of speculation coming up, and it is mainly based on the fact that “Purloined Letter” marks the last appearance of Dupin in Poe’s works. It is certainly plausible that, similarly to Dupin, Poe originally enjoyed writing the detective story much like Dupin enjoyed solving the Rue Morgue mystery. However, as time went on, things became less entertaining for them both, until the end, where Poe just wants to please his audience (help the prefect), cash his paycheck (50,000 francs), and stop writing these detective stories (no more Dupin mysteries). Although Poe was a great writer when it comes to mystery, he only wrote three “traditional” detective stories involving Dupin, which could be because he simply got bored of them, even though the genre took off in later years.
I like your theory of Poe being Dupin. I am not really a fan of "The Mystery of Marie Roget" because I feel that there's so much rational deduction going on that Poe seems to exclude the readers from the story. Usually an exciting detective story invites the readers to investigate together with the detective by presenting the evidence to them. Even in the other two stories on Dupin, the narrator can still represent the readers as an engaging observer with some occasional questions and clumsy theories. Now that we consider the possibility that Poe is simply enjoying solving mysteries as a detective along with the fact that the inspiration for the case of Marie Roget is from real life, it makes a lot of sense that at some point such interests of his fade and he doesn't really care about including readers to the mystery solving in the first place. He simply enjoyed the experiences of being Dupin and then he don't.
ReplyDeleteI like your analysis of Dupin. He does seem to get more disinterested as the stories progress to point that it really does just end up being about the money. They enjoyment is lost.
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