Narrator
The narrator is unnamed, a quality he shares with many other of Poe’s short story characters relating their account to the readers. He should be regarded as a kind of idiosyncratic version of the unreliable narrator since he opens his story using the formal language and construction of sentences normally reserved for academic scholarship rather than a criminal confession. His argument supporting the existence of a guiding force within the human consciousness he terms “the imp of the perverse” which is responsible for irrational decisions that stand in direct opposition to one’s own self-interest proceeds toward an inexorable collapse once he drops the distancing effect and confesses his person account of a long-planned and perfectly executed murder. By the end, his perverse decision to confess despite never being suspected seems less a product of an inherent flaw cognitive construction than the complete erosion of defenses against his own guilty conscience.
The Victim
The narrator gets his idea for how to carry out a perfect murder from the account of the mysterious near-fatal experience of a Madame Pilau who barely survived the accidental poisoning of a candle. The narrator poisons a candle to be used by his victim with the foreknowledge of the man’s nightly habit of reading in bed before going to sleep. Facilitating this plan which he arrived at only after having considered and rejected “a thousand schemes because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection” is the additional useful information that his living quarters are quite narrow and very badly ventilated. All that is really know about the victim aside from this is the motive for his murder: a decent estate which his murderer stood to inherit.
