In Narratology, there are some experts who “switch much of their critical attention away from the mere “content” of the tale, often focusing instead on the teller and the telling.” One of the narratologists who followed this approach was Gérard Genette; he focused on how the story was told rather than on the story itself. As a result, he created a set of six areas to be discussed when analyzing a story. These areas will be applied below to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter.”

The first area Genette identifies deals with the basic narrative mode. In “The Purloined Letter,” we find both “mimesis” and “diegesis”. According to Genette, mimesis is a way of telling a story which creates the illusion “that we are “seeing” and “hearing” things for ourselves” while diegesis is a quick way of narrating, so as to give the reader only the most essential information, without telling how a certain situation happened. Here is a good example of this blending in Poe’s story:

This functionary grasped [the letter] in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.

When he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.

The first paragraph is a clear example of mimesis, since we are given a detailed narration of what the Prefect actions were at the moment. However, in the second paragraph, which constitutes diegesis, we have a quick, general piece of information of what happened afterwards.

The second area that Genette mentioned constitutes the focalization of the narrative. In the case of “The Purloined Letter,” we can conclude that it was written with an “external” focalization, due to the fact that we are only told about actions that can be seen by anybody, therefore not including internal thoughts and feelings that we could not have knowledge of unless we were told. In this story, the narrator tells us only what happened between himself, Dupin and the Prefect, without mentioning anything beyond what he could see. This way, we reach Genette’s third area: the narrator of the story. In this case, it is “overt”, that is to say that he has witnessed and/or participated in the events he relates, which is exactly the case of our narrator. Moreover, he is a “homodiegetic” narrator, since he takes part in the story he tells us.

The fourth area refers to time, and in Poe’s story he deals with an “analeptic” narration. We can reach this conclusion because when the narrator is telling Dupin how he had decided to go and try to obtain the letter by himself, he also reminds him of certain things that the Prefect had said that led the narrator to be more certain of the whereabouts of the letter. This way, he was mentioning references back in time, which is precisely the essence of analepsis.

“The Purloined Letter” is not a frame narrative, which would have constituted Genette’s fifth area. Instead, this is a straight story, which means that we are not dealing with a story within a story. That would be the characteristic of frame narrations, which include embedded narrations or “meta-narratives” (the stories within the “frame” story, the former usually being the main ones).

Finally, the sixth area is about speech and thought. In the story we are analyzing, we can find direct and selectively tagged speech, such as:

“D–,” replied Dupin, “is a desperate man, and a man of nerve [...].”

“How? Did you put anything particular in it?”

Both sentences are written in direct speech, but the first one is tagged (’replied Dupin’), whereas the second one is not. That is why we talk about “selectively tagged”, sometimes it is tagged, sometimes it is not. However, if we follow strictly Genette’s terms for representation of speech, then “The Purloined Letter” has been written under mimetic speech, which is the same as saying “direct and tagged”, even if it is sometimes untagged as well.