January, 1968 TABLE of CONTETTS

37q' FIRST-PERSON NARRATION IN EDGAR ALLAN POE'S TALES THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Wallace Richard Bost, B. A. Denton, Texas January, 1968 TABLE OF CONTETTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION . ... II. FIRST-PERSON NARRATION AND POETS LITERARY 0 THEORY . .. .. 0 0 0 " 0 0 0 0 0 0 III. THE NARRATOR AS PROTAGONIST. .*...* . 23 IV. THE NARRATOR AS A MINOR CHARACTER. 0 47 V. OBSERVER AND MULTIPLE NARRATORS. ." 57 VI. CONCLUSION . ." 66 APPENDICES I. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE TALES IN WHICH THE NARRATOR IS THE PROTAGONIST. 0 0 . 70 II. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE TALES IN WHICH THE NARRATOR IS A MINOR CHARACTER. 0 . 71 III. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE TALES IN WHICH THE NARRATOR IS AN OBSERVER WHO IS NOT A PART OF THE STORY. .*.. 72 IV. CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE TALES IN WHICH FRAMEWORK IS EMPLOYED. 73 . BIBLIOGRAPHY . .. 74 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Most readers and even some critics are inclined to escribe Edgar Allan Poe 's literary genius not to his con- trolled imaginative and perceptual powers, but to a dis- ordered and chaotic mind, or to a morbid, semi-pathological state. The implication here is that Poe created the effect of his fanciful tales by chance or at best by devious or morally questionable means. Other unsympathetic but more some- sophisticated critics tend to dismiss Poe's tales as 1 what outmoded and Gothic juvenilia not worth serious study. Thus, Poe's art depreciates to a bag of tricks handled by a clever but cheap charlatan. Then there still exists a host of Poe's devoted admirers who refuse to accept the no- tion that "Poe's fiction is nothing but murky autobiography or psychodrama.1 2 These critics have in most instances proclaimed Poe's art more than they have explained it. There has been no really comprehensive examination of Poe's lIvor Winters, "Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the His- tory of American Obscurantism" (1937), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966), p. 196. 2 Richard Wilbur, "Edgar Allan Poe," Maior Writers of America, Vol. 1 of 2 vols. (New York, 1962), p. 372. 1 2 tactics--particularly, his extensive, varied, and skill- ful employment of first-person narration.3 Of the sixty-five short stories credited to Poe, sixty- three are in first person; only two, "The Duc De L'Omelette" and "A Tale of Jerusalem," are in the third person; and both stories are among the five earliest tales that Poe is known to have written and are among those least regarded by readers and critics. His other pieces of creative prose are either dramatic skits or book-length novellas. The preponderant amount of Poets short prose fiction in the first person makes it quite probable that he deliberately chose this method of narration in order both to produce the unity of effect which he so earnestly desired and to reveal the rationale of the disintegrating personality, which he seems to have preferred as a subject. Beyond this rather general observation concerning the connection of technique and subject lie the unexamined details of Poe's first- person technique. In 1921, Percy Lubbock declared that the critic's func- tion is to discover "the method by which . [the author] selects the information he offers,"4 and the "most obvious 3No definitive critical examination of Poe's use of narrative perspective has been published. Jay B. Hubbell, for example, laments that there is no "study of Poe's development . as a writer of tales." "Poe," Eight American Authors, edited by Floyd Stovall, New York, 1963, p. 20. 4Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1957), p. 63. 3 point of method is no doubt the difficult question of the centre of vision." 5 Lubbock then reiterates this idea at the end of his study: The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view--the question of the relatign in which the narrator stands to the story. These injunctions have influenced literary criticism for the past four decades, but oddly enough, no thorough appli- cation of Lubbock's theory has ever been made to the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Later critics have echoed and applied Lubbock's ideas, for example, Joseph Warren Beach in The Twentieth Century 11oel,7 and Mark Schorer in an essay "Technique as Dis- covery." 8 Thirty-four years after Lubbock, Norman Friedman expressed the same opinion in a valuable essay, "Point of View in Fiction: the Development of a Critical Concept"; he makes the flat statement that "'point of view' is becom- ing one of the most useful critical distinctions available to the student of fiction today." 9 5Ibid., p. 73. 6 Ibid., p. 251. 7 Joseph Warren Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York, 1932), pp. 15-16. 8Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," Essays in Modern Literary Criticism, edited by Ray B. West, Jr. (New York, 1952), pp. 190-191. 9Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The De- velopment of a Critical Concept," PILA, LXX (December, 1955), 1161. 14 There have been reservations, however, concerning the use of narrative method as a chief criterion of literary study. In The Writing of Fiction (1934), Arthur S. Hoff- man remarks that he has "not happened to see a systematic covering of the possibilities"1 0 of different points of view, and he suggests that an infinite number of combinations and variations may exist. Wayne C. Booth also has questioned this critical method: Like other notions used in talking about fiction, point-of-view has proved less useful than was expected by the critics who first brought it to our attention.1 1 Booth believes that the difficulty of defining precisely and classifying point of view, except in a very general way, limits the usefulness of extensive discussion. In the fiction of Poe, however, where the point of view is limited largely to the first person, it is possible to examine his use of this method with a view to discovering patterns and variations which indicate conscious artistic sensibility. As has been suggested, the narrative perspective1 2 of the first person is a structural principle with many 1 0Arthur S. Hoffman, The Writing of Fiction (New York, 1934), p. 327. 1 1 Wayne C. Booth, "Distance and Point-of-View; An Essay in Classification," Essays in Criticism, XI (January, 1961), 60. 1 2 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren refer to this convention as the "focus of narration" in Understanding Fic_- tion, rev. ed. (New York, 1959), p. 659. In this investiga- tion, "point of view" will be used interchangeably with "narrative perspective," and both terms will mean the agent "or agency through whose eyes the events are seen," as explained in Jessie Rehder's book The Young Writer at Work (New York, 1962), p. 103. possibilities. The narrator may be, and often is, the author per se; he may be a pseudo-author, or someone who is not the actual author but is pretending to be an author or setting himself up as one; he may be a character in the story; or he may be a mere observer (not necessarily the author) of the action. He can be either the main character or a minor character. These are the principal stances, but there are, of course, many combinations and variations. There also exists for the first-person narrator a relation- ship to the story in distance--distance in time, distance in space, and distance in emotional involvement. Perspec- tive may also be said to pertain to the position of the reader who oftentimes is not in the same relation to the events as the narrator or even the author. All of these technical factors together suggest or make manifest the author's intention and thus clarify his meaning and make possible certain valid judgments. For the purpose of this study, Poe's tales were read and considered carefully in chronological order, the idea being to discover growth and development. Poe's literary career was relatively brief (1832-1849), and there are no dramatic or definite breaks or periods. Though his produc- tion shows growth in sophistication and artistry, it has been deemed more instructive to group Poets first-person narrators according to the part they play in the story, that 6 is, (1) main actor or protagonist, (2) minor character, (3) observers and (4) combinations of the foregoing three. An attempt will be made to note both variation and pattern, and hence artistic skill, in Poe Is handling of each particular type of narrator. It is also of considerable import to examine Poe's direct statements concerning the matter of technique, in particular, point of view; for Poe was an astute and pro- lific critic of literary art; however, the terms, and per- haps even some of the ideas, of Lubbock were not available to him in a time when prose fiction--especially the short story--was in the childhood of its development. Chapter II of this thesis will discuss both point of view--its advan- tages and disadvantages--and Poe's apparent conception of it according to his pronouncements about it. Following chapters will take up each kind of narrator and point out excellencies and defects in Poe's method with individual stories. Finally an attempt will be made to evaluate this one aspect of Poe's artistry and its development during his brief and sad career.

Load more