SOURCE: DeNuccio, Jerome. “History, Narrative, and Authority: Poe's ‘Metzengerstein.’” College Literature 24, no. 2 (June 1997): 71-81.

In the following essay, DeNuccio examines the narrative authority in Poe's story “Metzengerstein.”

It is perhaps fitting that in “Metzengerstein,” his first published tale,¹ Poe explores the authority a writer wields over his narrative. What makes the tale interesting, however, is the strategy Poe employs: he uses a writing character's loss of authority to affirm his own. Poe's strategy hinges on the dual metempsychosis that occurs in the tale. On the surface, of course, the tale strongly implies that the soul of Count Berlifitzing has transmigrated to a horse, thereby exacting revenge on his hereditary enemy Baron Metzengerstein. But a second, less apparent, metempsychosis takes place between Metzengerstein and the narrator. Indeed, in the process of recounting Metzengerstein's obsessive desire for unbounded subjectivity, the narrator enacts a parallel desire for narrative authority. Both, however...