The Murders in the Rue Morgue: Its Narrator Knows the End

What does the narrator know, and when?

This site calls whatever a story has not yet handed to the reader at a given point the narrator’s pocket, and sorts each item into one of three kinds. A not-yet-known item is information the narrator does not have at that point either. A delayed item is information he possesses as he tells the story but saves for the place where he originally learned it. A concealed item is information he possesses and ought to give at that point, but deliberately keeps back.

The 1841 text identifies its narrator as someone recounting events that are already finished. His account of Paris opens in the past tense, on page 167:

“Residing in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18—, I there contracted an intimacy with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin.”

written by Edgar A. Poe · Graham’s Magazine, April 1841, p. 167

Near the end, after the sailor’s account, he writes “I have scarcely anything to add” (p. 178) and then reports how the case was settled. A narrator who can say that has the whole solution in hand, so almost every fact the reader still lacks at a given page is, for him, information he already possesses.

This page traces 16 facts about the case through the 1841 text. The narrator possesses 14 of them as he tells the story, while the other 2 he never learns for certain, and the text presents them only as probable guesses.

The chart shows the distance between the two lines. Facts begin to arrive on page 169, but the earliest explanation comes on page 173, and 11 of the 16 facts are handed over on pages 176 to 178, close to the end of the tale.

The same shape appears in miniature before the crime. On a night walk Dupin answers a thought the narrator has not spoken aloud, and only afterwards explains the chain behind it, which runs “Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer” (p. 168). Conclusion first, reasoning after: the murder case will take the same order.

Who is the narrator?

The text says little about him beyond his role. He is never named. He paid for the house because his circumstances were “somewhat less embarrassed” than Dupin’s (p. 167), and he explains that the word “affaire” lacks in France the lightness “which it conveys with us” (p. 169), which places him, and his readers, outside France without saying where.

What do the newspapers give him?

Neither man witnesses the crime. The case reaches them in print. The first report comes in an evening edition of a paper the 1841 text calls “Le Tribunal” (p. 169). Then “The next day’s paper” prints the statements of a laundress, a gendarme, several neighbours, a banker and his clerk, and two doctors.

A later evening edition adds that the clerk, Adolphe Le Bon, has been arrested (p. 171). The pocket fills up here: 10 of the 16 facts are first mentioned inside the newspaper pages, 169 to 171. They include the gold left on the floor, the marks on the daughter’s throat, the windows fastened from within, and a shrill voice that each witness assigns to a language he does not speak.

The narrator passes these reports on without saying which details will matter. Even at the house, after a visit that lasts until dark, he sees nothing the newspaper had not already printed:

“I saw nothing beyond what had been stated in the ‘Tribunal.’”

written by Edgar A. Poe · Graham’s Magazine, April 1841, p. 172

Dupin, by contrast, examines the whole neighbourhood and the house “with a minuteness of attention for which I could see no possible object” (p. 172). The next day he dismisses the paper itself, saying that “Le Tribunal” “has not entered, I fear, into the unusual horror of the thing” (p. 172). Earlier he had dismissed the Paris police as well, naming one real officer: “Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man” (p. 171). The Vidocq whom Dupin names in this tale had four volumes of memoirs published under his own name.

The 16 facts, with pages, paragraphs and quotations, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham’s Magazine (1841) text, E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore transcription, retrieved 2026-11-03

n = 16 facts about the case, each placed by the page of the 1841 Graham’s Magazine printing where it is first mentioned and the page where it is handed to the reader. The CSV adds paragraph numbers and the quotation for each hand-over.

Where does Dupin open the pocket?

The plainest delayed fact is a short stop on the way home from the house. On page 172 the narrator records it and nothing more:

“On our way home my companion stepped in for a moment at the office of one of the daily papers.”

written by Edgar A. Poe · Graham’s Magazine, April 1841, p. 172

Four pages later Dupin explains that he had left an advertisement “at the office of ‘Le Monde,’” a shipping paper, to draw the ape’s owner to their door (p. 176). At the moment of the stop the narrator did not know why Dupin went in. By the time he writes, he does, and he still places the reason where he learned it.

The nail in the back window works the same way. The narrator stood in that room on page 172, yet the broken nail appears only when Dupin describes his own test: “I touched it; and the head, with about the eighth of an inch of the shank, came off in my fingers” (p. 174). The narrator reports the discovery in Dupin’s words, at the point in the conversation where Dupin chose to reveal it.

Some of the waiting belongs to Dupin himself. On page 173 he tells his friend, “What the suspicion is, however, I will not say just yet,” and the suspicion comes out three pages later, when he hands over a passage from Cuvier describing the orang-outang (p. 176). Here the holding back happens inside the story, and the narrator, telling it later, simply keeps to the same order.

These items count as delayed rather than concealed because at every point the narrator reports what he believed at the time, and he never claims to have known more. When he writes “I could merely agree with all Paris in considering it an insoluble mystery” (p. 171), he is describing his view after the newspaper reports, not hiding the answer he holds as he writes.

Count who hands each fact over. Dupin hands over 12 of the 16 facts, all between pages 173 and 176. The narrator hands over three (the release of Le Bon and the two guesses), and the sailor supplies one delayed fact, what happened in the room.

A storyteller can hold back an ending for very different reasons, and another craft reading, where Galland’s manuscript of the Nights stops before the ending finds the holding back in a manuscript rather than a narrator.

Who tells what happened in the room?

The largest delayed fact is the night itself, and the narrator passes it to someone else. The sailor who owns the ape answers Dupin’s advertisement, and his story fills pages 177 and 178, but the narrator does not give it in the sailor’s words. In 1841 he says so directly:

“I do not propose to follow the man in the circumstantial narrative which he now detailed. What he stated was, in substance, this.”

written by Edgar A. Poe · Graham’s Magazine, April 1841, p. 177

The one eyewitness account in the tale therefore reaches the reader as a summary, and the summary marks its own gaps. Two facts remain guesses. One is whether the women noticed the ape climbing in, of which the text says only that “it seems probable that he was not immediately perceived” (p. 178).

The other is how the window came to be shut behind the escaping animal: “He must have closed the window as he passed through it” (p. 178). These are the two not-yet-known items, because the narrator does not possess them as he tells the story, and no one in the text supplies them. Clarke’s 1919 plate below draws the moment the sailor saw, a scene the text gives only through that summary.

What did Poe change for the 1845 Tales?

Poe reprinted the tale in Tales (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), pp. 116–150. Each printing is what this site calls a one-evening text, a single fixed witness among several, and the E. A. Poe Society also lists Poe’s fair-copy manuscript of early 1841, the “Johnston” manuscript, and an 1843 reprint. In this site’s studio terms, the 1845 Tales is a second pressing, and not an exact copy of the first.

Comparing the two printings paragraph by paragraph, 67 of the 128 paragraphs in the 1841 text have different words or spelling in 1845, another 33 differ only in punctuation, and 26 are unchanged. Two are dropped entirely: the opening paragraph on phrenology and the closing line, “Philadelphia, March, 1841.”

One paragraph is added at the head, an epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne that begins “What song the Syrens sang.” With the phrenology paragraph gone, the essay before Paris shrinks from 1,367 words to 1,175, epigraph included, and the whole tale from 14,144 words to 13,799.

Every 1841 paragraph and its 1845 counterpart, as CSV (where the data comes from) Data: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Graham’s Magazine (1841) and Tales (1845) texts, E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore transcriptions, retrieved 2026-11-03

Where did the pocket change?

The newspaper reports changed least in their wording, in 6 of their 25 paragraphs, but several changes touch the pocket directly. The paper “Le Tribunal” became the “Gazette des Tribunaux.” The narrator’s sentence about not following the sailor’s story disappeared, so the 1845 paragraph opens at “What he stated was, in substance, this.” One clue also moved:

The ape also changed its pronoun between the printings. The 1841 text reads “Gnashing his teeth, and flashing fire from his eyes, he flew upon the body of the girl” (p. 178), while the 1845 sentence reads “Gnashing its teeth” and “it flew” (p. 149), which is the wording printed under Clarke’s 1919 plate above. The 1845 text also adds a footnote to Dupin’s closing French phrase, “Rousseau — Nouvelle Heloise.”

What the device does not prove

The table sorts the facts, but it does not settle three larger questions. The first is fairness: nothing in the table shows that the tale plays fair with its reader in any modern sense. Every delayed fact is one the narrator possesses, yet most of them reach the reader only through Dupin’s explanation, and some were never available to check beforehand.

The ribbon from the foot of the lightning-rod is never mentioned until Dupin produces it on page 176, and neither is the tuft of hair. A reader working alongside the newspaper reports could notice the strange voice and the abandoned gold, but could not have weighed evidence that the text had not yet described.

The second question concerns the empty concealed row, which is a reading of these 16 facts rather than a rule about the narrator. Two personal details never come out at all: the “objects I then sought” in Paris (p. 167) and the service Le Bon once did for Dupin (p. 172). Neither touches the case, so neither appears in the table, and this page does not classify them.

In words: 14 delayed (12 handed over by Dupin, 1 by the sailor, 1 by the narrator), 2 not-yet-known (both given by the narrator as guesses), and 0 concealed.

The third question is history. The count says nothing about where the device came from or what it led to, and whether later writers borrowed the delayed narrator from Poe is a question about other books and other evidence. Poe’s narrator and Dupin return in the same narrator’s next case, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, which would need a count of its own.

In the April 1841 Graham’s, Poe’s narrator ends where he began, looking back: “I have scarcely anything to add.” By then the reader holds the 14 facts the narrator held from his opening sentence about Paris, together with the 2 guesses he could never turn into facts. Under the last paragraph of that printing, a line the 1845 Tales drops, stands a dateline: “Philadelphia, March, 1841.”