“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” also relies on the role
of the narrator as Dupin’s friend. Poe chooses not to use Dupin
as a narrator in order to provide a sense of detachment from the
workings of the mind that the story describes. The narrator’s role
as a foil enhances Dupin as the detective hero. The narrator admires
Dupin and prompts him to elicit his analysis, which always astounds
the narrator. He allows himself to be outwitted by Dupin, thereby
demonstrating that Dupin thinks one step ahead of both the police
and the average reader. Accompanying Dupin to the crime scene, the narrator
ostensibly witnesses the same evidence, but needs the explanations
of his friend in order to see the true nature of the evidence and
to understand its part in the larger puzzle.
Part of Dupin’s brilliance is his ability to separate
himself from the emotional atrocity of the crime scene. The police
become distracted by the sheer inhuman cruelty of the scene, but
Dupin is able to look beyond the violence and coolly investigate
the small details that otherwise go unnoticed. The decapitation
of Madame L’Espanaye is just one ghastly example that, according
to Dupin, draws the police away from solving the crime. For all
of Dupin’s rationality and cunning, though, the actual explanation
of the crime is, by all accounts, ridiculous—the Ourang-Outang did
it. It is difficult to discern whether he intended this solution
to be humourous. If the story is to be construed in some way as
a joke—the detective story was too young at this time to be parodied—it
is a joke told with the straightest of faces. Poe’s tendency to
exaggerate gets the better of him in his effort to illustrate the
analytic contrasts between Dupin and the Paris police. One can argue
that Dupin’s brilliance is ultimately overshadowed by the need to
import a wild animal into the solution to the crime. Dupin gets
the case right, but Poe may, in fact, go too far in exaggerating
the power of his protagonist’s reasoning.
