Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism | Death in American Literature (Vol. 89) - Dennis A. Foster (essay date 1990)

Dennis A. Foster (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Re-Poe Man: A Problem of Pleasure,”Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 4, Winter, 1990, pp. 1-26.

[Below, Foster analyzes several of Poe's fictions in the light of the critic's thesis that for the characters in Poe's stories “unpleasure is its own reward.”]

Ordinary fucking people. I hate them. —Repo Man

The plots of poe's stories are too shallow to bury the bodies the needs to cover up. The bodies return, a tell-tale part always there to betray the alibis of his narrators. Roderick Usher's friend happily buries the blushing Madeline; Dupin's sidekick believes the police would really overlook the filthy letter; Legrand's friend in “The Gold-Bug” listens wide-eyed to a story of an ancient cryptographic note found fluttering on the beach. The narrators insist on their own reason and sanity, but they readily put common sense aside. Luckily, we are...

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