Talk:The Imp of the Perverse (short story)

Imp of the perverse

Two part question... should the title start with "the" or can it be dropped? I think Wikipedia discourages "the" at the start of an article's title. Also, are the capital letters necessary? I'm thinking this is kinda hard to navigate to (and hard to find the Poe story of the same name). Midnightdreary 01:19, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

What exactly does the quote support?

I guess I'm confused by the reading/interpretation here of The Imp Of The Perverse and the use of the following quote:

We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. ... It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. ... [Then] The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies - it disappears - we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late! [1]

The narrator here is using the example of procrastination to illustrate the human proclivity to do what is not self-beneficial and which leads to the thing we most hope to avoid. The example begs the question, Why would a person intentionally do something that would harm him and suffer him the thing he most dreads? This intentionality (to do the opposite of what we want and what is good for us) is what the narrator means by "perverse." However, this is not to say the narrator is referring to the murder he commits, (as the Wiki contributor seems to take for granted.) In fact, what makes the story so chilling is that the murderer has no moral conflict with the murder itself. The murder never figures into his examination of the perverse.

To be sure, the narrator describes perversion as a terrifying thing one desires while simultaneously being repulsed by. It has the qualities of impatience, impetuousness, and abandon to terror.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger...

It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him, who shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge.

Compare this description to the description of the murder itself, which exhibits no such impulse, no horror, no fascination. In fact, he is quite methodic, self-restrained, and patient; he has no fear of committing the act, no moral reservation, no conflicting feelings.

It is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection.

Further, in the same paragraph, there is a clue that reinforces the narrator's attitude that the murder itself is not meant to be taken for perversion. It comes right after the narrator describes the murder:

But I need not vex you with impertinent details.

What the narrator describes as perverse, is his own confession to the murder because confession flies in the face of self-preservation. The narrator also does not mean for us to believe his conscience has had the better of him and has driven him to confession. Guilt propels; perversion compels. What he is saying is, the imagined horror [of facing his own death] compels him to disclosure. He has a warped fascination with his own ruin. What will annihilation feel like? This is the thought that obsesses him. It is the image that haunts the man on the precipice and the confessor alike.

In the final paragraphs of the story he describes his confession (note the similarities to the man on the precipice, the impatience):

They say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis, and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief, but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman, and to hell.

The narrator also argues (from the beginning) in defense of the perverse (the attraction to the thing we fear most, the thing that most horrifies us) as having an evolutionary purpose, sometimes promoting the good:

And we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the Arch-Fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good.

And to face the very thing that is most terrifying does not require just a little of that virtue known as courage.

So, my point is, the use of the procrastination quote seems intended to support the notion that murder and procrastination are on the same continuum of perversity, both involving a combat with doing what is right. But as my selections show, the murder has none of the qualities of the perverse as defined by the narrator. There is no conflict, no fascination, no compulsion. The Imp of Perversion is the agency that draws the narrator to confession because confession, like plunging from a precipice, is the realization of the horror he most dreads and to which he is perversely attracted. (Maria617 00:22, 5 May 2007 (UTC))