These stories then can be interpreted that Dupin is the most revered trickster to criminals he is questioning the public’s irrational beliefs that scientists can solve modern complex crimes. “Auguste” means the most revered, and Dupin may be associated with the English verb “to dupe.” Thus, his name and title have ambiguous meanings. Chevalier is the rank equivalent to a master detective in France. Poe’s crime-solving detective is officially titled Chevalier, Auguste Dupin. He believes that scientists are limited in arriving at new solutions in the same ways that the police are limited in solving crimes. The police are symbols for his criticisms of the professional scientists and the nineteenth century. He is critical of the established authorities and power structures. In his three tales of ratiocination, Poe demonstrates that Dupin’s methods of scientific reasoning are superior to those of the police. However, Dupin is always skeptical of his approach and solutions. The prefect thinks he has the perfect solution to the crime. The Paris police, right after Boston’s department, became one of the earliest professional police departments in the modern western world. In 1800, Napoleon reorganized the Paris police to fall under the jurisdictions of the Prefecture of Police for security. A “prefect” is the French representative of a department or Region. The prefect appears in each of the Dupin stories and serves as a symbol of the incompetence of police officials. Perhaps he may also have been “duping” his readers by presenting both possibilities simultaneously.Īs a non-professional detective, Dupin mocks the inferior crime-solving techniques of the paid Parisian police officials. Because of these contradictory views, it is hard to determine if Poe proposed ratiocination to address crime, or if he was mocking the irrational faith that the Age of Reason thinkers had in science. Among the ideas that Poe attacked in his detective stories was the irrational belief that man could ultimately attain near stages of perfection, and that he could control his environment by scientific methods. They believed that truth could be best be verified by observation and scientific investigation. They rejected dogma and sought ways to find objective knowledge. Perhaps, he also made this choice because many French scientists and philosophers epitomized Poe’s criticisms of these intellectual ideas of the nineteenth-century Age of Reason. As a result, Poe chose Paris to be the setting of all three of his Dupin mysteries. Auguste Dupin, of Paris, France to literature more than five years before Boston had established the country’s first professional police department. Matthew Pearl, in his “Introduction” to the Dupin Mysteries, notes that Poe introduced Detective C. Each Dupin story is a self-contained armchair mystery, in that he seldom needs to leave his home to solve the crime. He focuses on unexplained deviations from the normal, anticipates the actions and thoughts of his associates and opponents, and embraces information that, at first, appears to be external to the case. Dupin separates the relevant from the irrelevant. The narrator’s job is to be amazed at and inform the reader about the skills of the detective. Dupin presents the details of these cases directly or through an unnamed narrator to give readers a glimpse into his ratiocinative thinking. His methods of unraveling crimes are unorthodox and appear to the police as irrational. With the same understanding of the evidence that the police hold, he provides new metaphoric solutions. He approaches crime solving in the same way as he solves puzzles. He understands that clues and events are not always understood simply by the way that they appear. Dupin expands the use of accepted nineteenth-century classical investigation techniques and adds hyper-observation and intuitive leaps of imagination to arrive at new solutions. Poe develops a new system for establishing relationships between unknown events and the motives or solutions to complex problems. A ratio compares the relationships between two quantities. The term, ratiocination, is not listed in most dictionaries however, it may be defined by deconstructing its syllables and associating it with other related words. See photo of a French police officer above (.uk). He chose Paris, France for these tales because it had one of the first professional police forces. To respond to this concern, Poe demonstrates increasingly complex aspects of ratiocination in each of his three Auguste C. MURRAY ELLISON–Urban crime was an area of acute interest in the nineteenth century in America and Europe because the public feared that it was rampant and out of the control of the police.
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