Thou Art The Man

4 Pages 1086 Words

The short story ‘Though art the man’ by Edgar Allan Poe is an excellent example of true detective fiction in that it contains all four elements required to define the story as detective fiction. A crime is committed, a detective is involved in detecting necessary clues and an explanation is then given to piece together the mystery. Each of these four elements are skilfully woven together by Poe so that at the conclusion of the story, all elements are tied together and the reader is left wondering why he overlooked certain clues that were vital to the conclusion.

The crime itself is not immediately evident to the reader. There is an element of suspense as the background to the crime is described. Poe commences his story by describing the characters and setting the scene, and in doing this he foreshadows the events to come,
“This event… occurred in the summer of 18--…. Mr Barnabas Shuttleworthy had been missing for several days under circumstances which gave rise to suspicion of foul play.”(pg 269)
This is a clever tool used by Poe to engage the reader and get him/her to read on in the hope of discovering the truth about the events to follow. Although the murder itself is not as macabre as some of Poe’s other pieces of fiction, the final scene in which the corpse pops out of the box is very descriptive and quite gruesome.


The story is interesting in that it is written in first person and the reader never really knows the identity of the ‘detective’ who is also the narrator. This is an interesting tool used by Poe as many detective fiction authors use a sidekick to ‘bounce ideas off’ such as Watson to Sherlock Holmes but in this story the detective/narrator uses the readers as his sidekick to explain ideas and clues. As the detective remains anonymous the reader does not find out much about him but Poe has given the idea that he can be trusted and is reliable to detect the truth.
“…I instituted a r...