ABSTRACT
Edgar Allan Poe’s politics have been the subject of speculation and projection since Baudelaire first praised Poe for what he saw as Poe’s justified contempt for American democracy. Unreliable narrators invite readers’ active participation in deciphering a narrative because they themselves misunderstand what they describe, overlook important connections, or fail to see their own or others’ motivations. Poe uses unreliable narrators in virtually all of his stories, and their function is always to describe but fail to recognize important elements of the story, obliging the reader to make the connections the narrator misses. Narrators can be unreliable in many different ways, but Poe’s narrators tend to be unreliable in one particular way: like Metzengerstein, they often have no conscience. The chapter shows how the issues of conscience and denial are central to Poe’s fiction—and that the precise form of irony that he stages in relation to these issues is often that of moral blindness.
