The killer character in Edgar Allan Poe's short stories - a view from Hegel's philosophy of self-consciousness

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are often evaluated based on his artistic talent – his ability to use special composition techniques such as the Single Effect technique, a literary theory proposed by Edgar Allan Poe himself, in order to extract highly effective emotional responses from readers, including the fight-or-flight response. This trend of research focuses on writing techniques, which are consistent with Edgar Allan Poe's conception of the importance of effects in artistic creation. Providing a different approach, this article appreciates his short stories in the aspect of philosophical thought that he conveyed in his works, in particular his ability to not only conclude the general rule from which criminal psychology was born, but also to suggest the way out of it. Finding anger, lust for murder, and terror of death, which constantly dominate the surface of Edgar Allan Poe’s horror works, the study tries to understand the core principle hidden in his works that caused such psychological phenomena. Guided by Hegel’s philosophy, this research explains that the desire to self-certainty in the primitive form – through fight to death – of self-consciousness is the psychological operation mechanism of the character in Edgar Allan Poe’s horror short stories.