Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Analyzing the Mystery of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Poe’s narrator asserts, somewhat facetiously, that the preface to the short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” is a series of random observations. A close reading of this discussion of the role of analysis in its relation to the games of chess and whist may, however, reveal precisely those elements of analytical observation that allow the character Dupin to solve the murders in the following narrative.

For Poe’s narrator, analysis is “that moral activity which disentangles” (Poe 141), not the mere calculations that could allow someone to excel in the game of chess, with its rote and arbitrary set of rules, where a single oversight results in as big of a loss as the police later in the story, whose rote problem-solving methods do not allow them to see beyond the closed windows and solve the murders. Instead, analysis is a keenness of observation, which successfully attends to “a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived” (Poe 142), even those sources that seem to surpass the average and everyday intellect. To illustrate this, the narrator describes the depth of observations that an analytical whist player might attend to beyond the rules of the game, primarily the expressions and mannerisms of his opponents. It is this keen, analytical observation, both of the expressions of others and of all the sources of advantage, which is attributed to the narrator’s friend, Auguste Dupin.

Prior to the description of the murders from which the tale gets its title, Dupin is described in an anecdotal scene as being able to trace back the narrator’s train of thought, through a series of seemingly random meditations of an “apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal” (Poe 147). The narrator makes clear that this is no mystery or fraud on his friend’s part, but purely the result of an analytical methodology that makes the fullest use of every available observation: the narrator’s stumble on the paving stones, his glance at the constellation Orion, words from a conversation that the characters had previously, these all help Dupin successfully disentangle the direction of the narrator’s thoughts.
While the vision of the police is impaired by “holding the object [of their enquiry] too close” (Poe 156), and thus not sufficiently analytical, Dupin is able to solve the murders in the Rue Morgue by virtue of his own critical observations of several peculiar phenomena connected to the crime. The three biggest challenges faced by the police in solving the murders are the questions of who is the person in the room with the shrill and un-linguistically recognizable voice, how did the supposed murderers escape the seemingly locked room without being discovered, and finally who would have committed such inhumanely brutal and apparently motiveless murders.

Having been given a somewhat detailed account of the testimonies surrounding the murders, which constantly describe which languages the rescue party believe the shrill voice to be in, it shouldn’t be too difficult for the reader to follow Dupin’s analytical accounting of the voice. While the witnesses are in disagreement over the nationality of the voice, Dupin observes that in one regard they do agree: “each one spoke of [the voice] as that of a foreigner” (Poe 160), with an unequal tone devoid of clearly articulated words. While this does not yet tell us who committed the crime, Dupin suggests that it is the peculiarity of this observation that is important, an observation made by disentangling all of the data that had been put before him in the testimonies.

Turning to the question of the culprit’s escape, when the two characters go to look at the house on the Rue Morgue, the narrator notes that Dupin searched the whole premises “with a minuteness of attention for which [the narrator] could see no possible object” (Poe 157). Dupin discovers that the windows are rigged to stay closed, which leads the police to disregard them as a means of departure from the room, but it is precisely this oversight that leads Dupin to believe the windows were used for the escape. Indeed, being of an analytical mindset not closed to all the possibilities of the situation, he soon discovers that one of the nails holding the window shut had been severed, and someone of an almost superhuman strength could have climbed up the drain-pipe outside.

These details of the murder’s peculiar voice and extraordinary strength lend credibility to Dupin’s analysis that the brutal method of the murders, which have occurred despite the victims’ money having not been stolen to account for a motive, may have been done by something which is not human. For, as he suggests, it is the “outré character of its features” (Poe 158) that should make this mystery easy to solve. But it is not a supernatural horror or madman that perpetrated the crime; Dupin goes on to show by his observations of the characteristics of a hair and the size of a handprint left behind, the murderer was in fact an escaped orangutan, which perfectly accounts for all the peculiarities of the evidence.

It would seem, for Poe’s narrator, that in the observational skills of an analytical mind, which pays attention to all the peculiar details of a situation, no problem is too difficult to be solved. As Dupin succinctly puts it, the question that should be asked by such a person is not “what has occurred,” but “what has occurred that has never occurred before” (Poe 159). All answers can be disentangled from that distinction.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. Ed. by David Galloway. New York: Penguin Press, 2003.