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By Stuart Hutchinson (auth.)

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On his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been 24 The American Scene torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge seagull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and tallons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood. (Chapter 10) In 'The Ancyent Marinere' continuing original sin is committed by the mariner against the albatross. Here we have the reverse: atrocity committed on the body of man, even as he is in the position of imploring prayer to the wide, wide sea.

For Poe and his narrators it may be that life only is to be understood fleetingly as mad, or absurd, or perverse. Among the many works Poe's stories look forward to, as Harry Levin saw thirty years ago, 12 is Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground (1864). Especially in the three stories presently under consideration, Poe's narrators may be unconsciously where Dostoyevsky's narrator (again in a richer context) is consciously, when he claims: 'I invented a life, so that I should at any rate live. ) of those who desperately confess in order to claim a status for the self.

Vital institutions then, such as the scaffold, are now 'merely historical and traditional among us' (Chapter 2). Even as Hawthorne is writing, the validity of his terms becomes questionable, so that we are continually having to negotiate with the text. This process is Romance at its most significant level, when neither author nor reader can be confident of the stability of language. - Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.

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