SOURCE: Thoms, Peter. “The Stories of Poe's Dupin.” In Detection & Its Designs: Narrative & Power in 19th-Century Detective Fiction, pp. 44-70. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Thoms analyzes Edgar Allan Poe's stories featuring detective C. Auguste Dupin, and asserts that in “the Dupin stories the detective emerges not as the criminal's polar opposite but as an ambiguous figure who shares that transgressor's desire for control.”

Caleb Williams strips storytelling of its innocuous veneer to expose its sinister motives. In the novel's opening chapters Caleb's narrative appetite, like the reader's curiosity, seems relatively innocent and harmless: he indulges his private passion first in reading books and then—in a shift that might initially appear equally harmless—in reading his mysterious employer. But through Godwin's depiction of his latter act—of Caleb's reading, detecting, and writing of Falkland—we eventually discern that narration is an oppressive assertion of...