Like so many of Poe’s first-person narrators struggling with madness, this one has no name. Well, certainly he has a name, but it is not shared with the reader. And like those other characters with names that are not shared, the lack of this vital as for identifying the narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” is not the result of a lack of imagination or simply oversight on the part of the author. Poe is far too attentive to detail—in fact, he is one of the most detail-oriented of all short story writers—for the lack of providing names for protagonists who are sharing their life accounts to be anything other than very intentional. This intention is part and parcel of Poe’s legendary contribution to the art of crafting short fiction in which there ideally will be a “unity of effect” in which every single aspect of composition serves a specific purpose.
The decision to have a person without a name telling his stories of madness contributes very much to the unity of effect by immediately establishing that these narrators are intended to be less a distinct individual relating a unique story than an allegorical conception of the human condition. The narrator of “The Imp of the Perverse” begins his confessional almost as though writing an academic paper. The opening of the story is the exact opposite of that other famous Poe story narrator by a murderer flirting with madness. Consider “The Tell-Tale Heart” begins with an eye toward how the composition of the sentences create a psychological portrait of the narrator:
“True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them.”
It is almost impossible to imagine that the man telling this story is no suffering great emotional anguish likely stimulated from a breakdown in mental processes at some point beyond the norm. Contrast that Poe murderer with the one who begins his tale in this way:
“In the consideration of the faculties and impulses — of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them.”
These opening lines are substantially different in every imaginable way from that of the “The Tell-Tale Heart” but both serve the same essential purpose. The intense and emotion-rich language of one distances the reader from his narrator immediately by explicitly delineating the difference between the murderer and the average person. Poe wants the reader to immediately grasp that—to use the modern vernacular—this boy ain’t right. (It will then be up to each reader to decide whether this condition of not being right is genuine or whether the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” is perhaps less reliable and more duplicitous than he usually gets credit for being.)
With its formal language, the opening lines of “The Imp of the Perverse” also immediately distances the reader from the narrator, but unlike the other story, this situation changes substantially over the course of the story so by the, the reader has been subtly lured into a trap. That lofty language which is better suited for publication in a scholarly journal also features a very idiosyncratic grammatical feature which is the concerted substitution of singular pronouns for the collective. “We” or “us” recurs around fifty times in the first half of the story before disappearing forever in the last half where “I” and “me” suddenly appear out of nowhere, replacing the pluralism of the first half to become the narrator’s pronouns of choice.
This strategy is designed to a large degree by Poe to subtly implicate the reader into sharing the psychic condition of his deranged narrators. In this case in particular as opposed to the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” who is clearly insane (or trying to convince the reader he is insane) from the start, here the strategy works diligently toward the purpose of luring the reader into the snare the narrator is trying to set. His language starts out with that overly formal distancing in order to situate his argument about the existence of the “imp of the perverse.” By the end, the formality has collapsed, the “we” has become the “I” and the perfect logic of the concept of some inner imp guiding humans toward their irrational behavior has being crumbling to reveal an equally logical—but less enticing—alternative explanation: the alleged imp is nothing more than an invention used to justify one’s lack of moral courage in standing up to one’s darker impulses.
