Logic
The standout feature of "The Purloined Letter" is C. Auguste Dupin's use of abstract reasoning. This tale is one of Edgar Allan Poe's "tales of ratiocination," focusing on logic—rather than the horror typical of his other works—as the main narrative driver. Dupin, who also unravels mysteries in some of Poe's other ratiocination stories, is a detective who uses deductive reasoning to solve the mystery of the missing letter.
In the story, Dupin uses his understanding of the situation to deduce where the letter is hidden. His deduction relies on three key elements: his insights into the Prefect's behavior and thought processes, his knowledge of the Minister's actions and mindset, and his overall grasp of human nature.
As Dupin explains to the narrator, his recent conversations with the Prefect and past experiences reveal that the Prefect follows "principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity" familiar to him. Dupin notes that the Prefect assumes "all men proceed to conceal a letter... in some out-of-the-way hole." From the Prefect's perspective, when someone wants to hide something, they tend to use secret compartments or other concealed spaces, believing themselves clever. The Prefect has previously discovered many such hiding places, so he expects to find one again. When Dupin suggests to the Prefect "to make a thorough research of the premises," the Prefect misinterprets this as advice to look for hidden compartments, thus continuing his ineffective search.
Moreover, Dupin understands, based on his knowledge of the Minister and his habits, that the Minister is exceptionally intelligent. Dupin accurately infers that the Minister must be aware of "the secret investigations of his premises" and that by leaving his home every night and making the search easier, he leads the investigators to conclude "that the letter was not upon the premises." Additionally, Dupin deduces that the Minister recognizes the police's reliance on conventional search methods and would therefore be inclined "to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice."
The final clue Dupin uses to discover the letter's location relies on his understanding of human nature, a skill the Minister also possesses. Dupin explains to the narrator that some things can "escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious." He illustrates this with a game involving a map, where the goal is to find a specific word hidden on it. According to Dupin, "a novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names." These novices, like the Prefect, believe they can outsmart their opponents by focusing on obscure details. However, Dupin observes, "the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other." When someone is searching for something obscure, they often overlook the obvious that doesn't match their expectations.
Scientific Investigations
While Dupin's deductive reasoning, specifically tailored to the case, ultimately solves it, the Prefect also uses logic. However, the Prefect's logic is limited by his past experiences, particularly the investigative techniques that have typically brought him success.
The Prefect offers a detailed account of these techniques, many of which are based on rational and scientific methods. When describing the search of the Minister's home, he explains, "we divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed." In each of these carefully defined search areas, they used a "powerful microscope" on items like chairs and tables to discover any hidden compartments. "There is a certain amount of bulk—of space—to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The...
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fiftieth part of a line could not escape us." By comparing an object's external size to its visible internal space, the Prefect and his team could spot any extra space that might indicate a hidden compartment.
The Prefect's methods are so scientific and precise that he claims even the tiniest signs would be noticeable. "A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple." However, as Dupin points out from the beginning, "it is the very simplicity of the thing" that outsmarts the Prefect. The Prefect believes he has "investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed," but his methods fail in this instance because they focus only on "secret" areas, neglecting the obvious ones.
Politics
The theft of the letter is driven by political motives. The Minister, who opposes the Queen, has taken the letter to use it as leverage. As the Prefect points out, "the power thus attained has, for some months, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent." Although the letter's contents remain unknown, it is implied that revealing them could greatly damage the royal family. Dupin, who knows the Minister and supports the Queen politically, tells the narrator, "You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned." This loyalty prompts Dupin to become involved in retrieving the letter.
As a clever political tactician, Dupin understands that if he can swap the letter with a fake without the Minister realizing it, he can turn the situation to his advantage and orchestrate the Minister's political downfall. Dupin notes that the Minister, "being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, will proceed with his exactions as if it was." In other words, the Minister will continue to blackmail the Queen with the fake letter, believing she will meet his demands and carry on with his bold schemes, which he wouldn't dare attempt without the letter's protection. This deception, as Dupin observes, will lead "to his political destruction." Dupin feels no sympathy for the Minister's looming downfall, stating, "in the present instance I have no sympathy—at least no pity—for him who descends." To Dupin, the Minister is an "unprincipled man of genius," deserving severe consequences for his political misdeeds.
Indeterminacy of Meaning
“The Purloined Letter” has been the subject of considerable commentary, most interestingly as the bone of contention between two of the more prominent contemporary French thinkers, the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who have argued about the story’s pertinence to the themes and significance of psychoanalysis. It would require considerable space to lay out the complicated arguments that each of these thinkers mounts in reading Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, but one could characterize this debate briefly as signifying the difference between a reading of the story as presenting readers with a definite and finitely circumscribed set of meanings (roughly Lacan’s position) and one that denies categorically, on behalf of Poe’s story, the possibility that any definitive interpretation of the elements in this or any narrative can ever be produced. One could say, perhaps too schematically, that Derrida’s claim rests primarily on the fact that the precise contents of the letter are never revealed, and that therefore the letter itself becomes an emblem of the indeterminacy in meaning that the tale enacts. Certainly the central tension in the story between the calculating and rationally motivated Dupin and the more shadowy narrator—whose relation to Dupin is established in prior stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—as well as the difficulty of knowing precisely how to apply the closing citation to the case of the minister and his actions, suggests that Lacan’s more or less straightforward symbolic interpretation of the tale as an allegory of sexuality misses many of the subtlest discriminations that the narrative establishes.
Appearance vs. Reality
Once one has opened up the possibility that all is not as it seems—and this is the very possibility on which the plot turns because it is the appearance of the letter itself that is crucial to its concealment by the minister—it is not simple to begin to pin down the meaning of individual elements. Nor is it absolutely certain at the end that Dupin has in fact delivered the original letter to the prefect because he might, with the knowledge of the original’s contents, have prepared a facsimile and retained the original for purposes that he does not here reveal. In truth, readers know little more about the facts of the matter at the end than they did at the beginning, although they have been initiated into an astonishingly intricate web of stratagems.