The Imp of the Perverse starts off sounding like a philosophical essay. After a few pages, suddenly it's a story out of the blue! This seriously threw me off. I couldn't get my head around having no transition from essay-style to story-style and yet we're expected to agreeably accept this and somehow understand that the first part relates to the narrator's tale.
When I re-read the essay-part (as I'll now call the first few pages), I realized it was like a prologue to the story-part. With all the talk about impulses , logic, and reasoning, I feel as though the narrator is trying to justify himself to the reader before the reader even knows what actions he carried out. It's like a little kid who has done something bad and builds up their parents for what's happened with the underlying message being 'It's not really my fault' when it really is. The line "Had I not been thus prolix, you might either have misunderstood me altogether; or with the rabble, you might have fancied me mad," clinches it for me. He's stuck in a prison, which I gathered from "fetters" and "tenanting this cell of the condemned." But he's telling us that basically it's not his fault at all. Its the fault of the "Imp of the Perverse" which he spent the past several pages trying to explain to us.
Now really, to me as the reader, all that wordiness does the opposite of what the narrator is trying to achieve: it proves he truly is mad. It reminds me of Shakespeare's quote "the lady doth protest too much." At times though, all the essay-ish words made me lost and confused and I found myself having to go over lines I had just read.
My question to everyone would be, what do you think is the point of this story? The philosophical perverse mind of a murderer who kills with poisoned candles? And I want to know, do you think it was really necessary to carry on as long as he did before getting to the story?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
When I first began reading, I also thought that it was an essay. I did not know where he was going with it until he got into the story. Whenever a character protests that he is not mad, he usually is! He confesses just to see if he is capable of doing so- "And now my own casual self-suggestion, that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guily...". He even admits he is a fool if he says anything. Maybe the moral of the story is that people do things, for the reason that they shouldn't.
I too was thrown off by the narrator's story. I think the first part serves as a way of getting the reader in a comfortable place, by presenting a logical and reasonable explanation. Once you find out that the narrator has murdered someone, you start to think about his explanation of the "imp of the perverse." If his reasoning made sense to you before, you might not want it to anymore if a murderer is using it to explain why he confessed.
Also, at the end he says that "To-morrow I shall be fetterless!--but where?" What type of freedom is he referring too?
Again, I agree with the strange beginning of the story and its form. I think it was a disclaimer to what was about to be told like you have all said. I also wanted to comment on the fact that with the meaning of the Imp being a devilish demon that takes control and the meaning of the perverse being countering what is desired, he still has no true excuse. I just feel that he is using the idea of someone doing something just because you are not supposed to in the completely wrong way. I see perverse as taking a cookie before dinner or getting in the last hit in a fight or a mother telling her child not to do something and as soon as she turns her back the child does it because they can even if there is no desirable outcome. I don't feel that murder is a product of the perverse. Murder is a strong crime and there is no excuse in his story that justifies what he ends up doing. I think that the beginning of the story used a whole bunch of big word (that I kept having to look up in the dictionary) to confuse the reader maybe as if he was trying to just get them to agree with him becasue he seemed so intelligent. If you can't can't trust the intelligent, who can you trust?
The transition definitely threw me off too. I think maybe because I read it with the other two philosophical essays about the soul. So many big words and concepts which flew over my head. The story part was far easier to understand though.
I think the point of the story is just to get into the head of a murderer, to see that they don't believe what they are doing as their own fault. I like what Laura said about how he used the beginning to get the reader behind him, to accept what he says as fact, and then twists it into his alibi where the reader has to question what they thought just a few minutes prior.
But then, I personally don't think that he is calling the murder the imp but his accidental yet elaborate confession was. He knew he didn't want to confess, he knew it would harm him, but some devil compelled him to confess. So maybe the entire story about the imp itself was to get the public to understand why he confessed when he got away with it.
I think the ending refers to his doubts about where his soul will end up. "To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless! - but where?" He has committed a sin in murder, but he confessed, but he confessed without real desire to. To go to heaven you have to confess your sins but if you did it for the wrong reasons, would you still get into heaven? It seems to be yet another argument on the soul.
Post a Comment