"The Angel of the Odd" is a humorous story by Edgar Allan Poe that places a skeptical narrator into a series of absurd situations. Through these actions, the Angel tests the narrator's belief in "the possibility of the odd." These odd predicaments range from silly to life-threatening: the narrator sleeps through a meeting due to an extremely specific malfunction of his clock, he accidentally burns down his house, he ruins two attempts at marriage, and he accidentally runs off of a precipice.

The story frequently references alcohol to emphasize the first-person narrator's unreliability. The Angel's body is made out of bottles of alcohol. Among the wreckage of the narrator's fall into the dining room is an empty jug of "Kirschenwasser"—an alcoholic beverage distilled from cherries. These references serve as reminders that the story began with the narrator drinking from "miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and liqueur" and becoming intoxicated.

Whether the narrator really saw an "Angel" is open to the reader's interpretation, but you can use hints in the text to make your decision. For example, the many references to alcohol suggest that the narrator's meeting with the angel and all of the amazing situations that followed were imagined—side effects of being overly intoxicated. It follows, then, that the angel's accent could be Poe's attempt to imitate the way an extremely drunk person speaks. It certainly adds to the humor of the story.

The falling action of a story (also called the "denouement") occurs after the climax and usually describes the consequences of the climax or resolves other details from the plot. In this story, the falling action is the narrator's literal fall from the balloon piloted by the angel into his home and his awakening on the floor of his dining room.