How people do things that are not suppost to do - Essay Example

Not only does the apparently unmotivated take on motive; perversely, we become visitors to a prison rather than readers of a philosophical discourse:” “The speaker denies his madness by calling himself a victim of the principle he has outlined. Yet his language hovers between calculation and illogic. The narrator explains "why I am here . . . wearing these fetters" by reference to a cause that is only a perverse absence of cause. From the standpoint of realistic representation, the perverse narrator betrays his deviance through linguistic peculiarities.

“ “…he assumes an understanding of what he has not yet explained. Both fictional speakers break accepted conventions by employing the definite article, where "the idea" and "the murder" have not been previously explicated. If we read these narrators as mimetic characters, their linguistic deviations may be signs of defective mental processes.” “A rhetorical moment takes the place of all ghosts, when "the imp of the perverse" drives the speaker to confess. "The rabble" would understand his behavior as a symptom of madness, but his perversity turns out to be a reflex inherent in words.

” “The narrator is a man in crisis. His drinking has pushed him to the point where he is capable of violence, even against a wife who, although patient and long-suffering, is incapable of helping her husband. The two cats in this story remind him of better days, before the narrator’s alcoholism produced in his personality “a radical alteration for the worst” (598). But his substance abuse has provided him with at least one insight. He has learned that “the spirit of PERVERSENESS,” the self’s “unfathomable longing to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature,” is a fundamental aspect of “the character of Man”” “The narrator’s alcoholism, his propensity for violent behavior, his acute isolation, and