FREE ESSAY ON POE'S USE OF LEAD CHARACTERS

POE'S USE OF LEAD CHARACTERS

It is very easy to associate Edgar Allen Poe with thoughts of dreariness and darkness and
with good reason as much of his writing does reflect those very downcast moods. Although,
authors do like to sometimes break their stereotypes and produce things entirely
different from their usual and Poe is no exception. This can be easily observed by
comparing the use of his lead characters in the stories "The Black Cat", "Hop-Frog" and
"The Purloined Letter."
Each character is in a different situation and the reader has a different reaction to
each one according to their actions.
The narrator in "The Black Cat" is the kind of character one likely comes into contact
with most in Poe's works. He is a man who is mad and in his madness commits terrible sins
that can only seem justified in their own insane reasoning. He very much denies his
madness from the very beginning of the story when he comes right out and says "My very
senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad I am not." He makes all the excuses he can
come up with for his actions, but they do little more than prove his insanity to the
reader. After he viciously gouges out the eye of a cat he is convinced he loves, he
admits that his soul is untouched by the guilt he should be overcome with after such an
offensive crime. He says "I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for
the crime which I had been guilty; but it was a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the
soul remained untouched." He feels himself overcome with a feeling of perverseness and
cannot keep himself from doing things for no other reason than he knows they are wrong.
He is not a good man, throughout the story he does multiple evil things without remorse.
Hop-Frog, on the other hand, starts off his story as the underdog. "His value was trebled
in the eyes of the king, by the fact of his being also a dwarf and a cripple." It seems
he has everything against him. His sole purpose to the king's court is to be laughed at.
He is not treated as though a person, but merely an object for the king's amusement and
therefore he is shown respect and pity from absolutely no one excepting his only friend
and fellow dwarf Trippetta whom had been captured from the same country as himself. In
addition to the constant emotional torture he receives from those around him, he is in
constant physical pain whenever he walks, thus the basis of his nickname "Hop-Frog,
through the distortion of his legs, could only move with great pain and difficulty along
a road or floor." Poe uses the first half or so of the story to evoke pity from the
reader for Hop-Frog's sad and pathetic position and making him the protagonist and the
king and his ministers the antagonists. Although Hop-Frog does do a terrible and gruesome
and terrible thing by tricking the king and his ministers and burning them alive, one
finds it hard to hate him for it in light of the actions that had provoked it. In this
way he is different from the narrator in our first story as they both committed great
evils, but where one the reader hates for his actions the other they are better able to
relate to and appreciate the justice that results. Instead of feeling pity for the
victims, one finds themselves happy that Hop-Frog and Trippetta are able to get their
revenge and leave the place they so hated. Hop-Frog is a good character who does to evil
things but with justification.
Monsieur Dupin in "The Purloined Letter" is very much unlike either of the aforementioned
characters. This story is very different to the others addressed because there are no
gruesome acts of evil, no one dies and no one is subjected to painful torture. It is
somewhat uncharacteristic of what one may have come to expect from Poe. Monsieur Dupin's
actions are in no way evil but instead well thought out actions of wit and intelligence.
He demonstrates his unconventional ways of thinking in solving the crime that others had
been incompetent to. The Prefect, for example is perplexed by his own inability to solve
a crime that seems so simple. He states "'We have all been a good deal puzzled because
the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us all together.'" The minister make the Prefect
seem a fool to the reader by showing him it is the very simplicity of the matter that
allows the letter to elude his frantic searches. He brings to the reader's attention that
a poet such as the thief thinks differently than the average mind. In speaking of the
Prefect and the rest of his force he mentions "Their ingenuity is a faithful
representative of the mass; but when cunning of the individual felon is diverse in
character from their own, the felon foils them." Instead of hating him or pitying him as
we might the characters in the other stories, the reader develops respect for his
superior powers of reasoning. In the same way, instead of pitying or despising the
victims of our lead character as in the past stories, we are somewhat humored by their
being made fools of. The only thing Dupin really has in common with the narrator in "The
Black Cat" and Hop-Frog is they are all of above average intelligence, a trait shared by
many of Poe's leading characters. Monsieur Dupin is a good and intelligent character who
goes the whole story without any evil acts.
As much as people tend to assume all of Poe's stories are much alike, in comparing these
three one can see he uses three different, distinct kinds of lead characters to generate
different obvious reactions. The reader's response to each lead character and those he
interacts with changes from story to story. Therefore each story had a different overall
effect and feel to it. The characters may quite possibly be the most important element in
any story for if the reader cannot relate to the emotions or empathize at all with any of
the character there will be little or no emotion provoked by the story, in which case it
would likely have had little impact on the reader.