A retórica do narrador em “O barril de amontilla” e “O demônio da perversidade”, de Edgar Allan Poe: uma fantástica configuração da perversidade

Abstract

The majority of Edgar Allan Poe’s works, if not all, consist of intriguing narrators, always involved in mysteries, deaths, crimes and confessions that, in the course of the histories, express the deeply thought writing of its creator. In his narratives, the author reveals a thriller atmosphere permeated by ambiguities in which the reader is inserted and invited to participate in a declarative game, guided by the narrator, that arises with the purpose of misleading and making him question the authenticity of the exposed “facts”. The discursive strategies are one of the fundamental characteristics of Allan Poe’s writings, as well as his “unreliable narrators” that can show mental disorders and, in some of his tales, suffer with mood swings, becoming aggressive and unpredictable. Poe’s entire work has been investigated under different perspectives, in this study we analyzed the narrator’s category, considering imbalance and perversity as the elements responsible for his actions, in order to demonstrate how literature can copy, in greater or lower degree, the condition of individuals in fiction. Therefore, we present reflections about fear, evil and monster in order to expose how this discussions clarified the understanding about the element of perversity in the plot, from the narrators above all, how the rhetoric analysis of the protagonists could show its “true faces”. We start from the following questioning: What is the rhetoric paper in the wicked exposition of the protagonists? For this purpose we selected Poe’s tales “The Imp of The Perverse” (1845) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), defined the narrators, in first person, as a specific figure in the narrative that configures, by its actions, the perversity present in the tales. To support the analysis we selected Arthur Hobson Quinn’s (1969) and Marie Bonaparte’s (1958) texts to discuss the critical biography, the theoretical discussion will be supported by Jean Delumeau (2009) to address the fear, Agostinho (1986) to reflect the topic of evil, some considerations from Gérard Genette (1972), Ligia Chiappini (1994) and Wayne Booth (1980) to discuss about the narrator, among other theorists that were essential to understand the other perspectives this work addresses. Finally, we present an analysis corresponding to the narrators rhetoric and the configuration of the perversity in both tales, proving, therefore, that according to the noted criteria, the narrators’ rhetoric is crucial to build the perverse profiles of Montresor and the unnamed narrator, along the narrative.