And although we remember the tales as having strong characters and plots, Poe was, as psychoanalytic criticism inadvertently demonstrated, not really very interested in either.

Poe’s characters are largely psychic types. However precisely they represent mental disorientation, the tales do not locate these images of insanity within particularized individuals. All Poe’s narrators speak roughly the same language. Unconcerned with the ways in which mental states shape personalities or events, Poe treated all disorientation as the same, whether it derived from guilt, anger, fear, or stupidity; and there is little tonal difference between the murderer in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and the innocent prisoner of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The tales show no fascination, as do Freud’s case-studies, for how inner turmoil gets expressed differently by individuals, and, in the absence of such personalizing idiosyncrasies, the Usher twins seem much less fully imagined characters than Wolf-Man or Dora.

Poe was no more concerned with plotting than with characterization. According to his celebrated theory about the ‘unity of effect’, every element of a tale must contribute to the overall purpose. In reviewing Hawthorne’s tales, Poe explained:

in almost all classes of composition, the unity of effect or impression is a point of great importance…. [The skilful literary artist] has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.

Attempting to professionalize writing, the theory glorified artistic wholeness or ‘integrity’, by insisting that a work which did not from its very first sentence start doing whatever it intended to do did not deserve the name of ‘art’.

The apparent singularity of these ‘effects’ misled both his readers and occasionally even Poe himself to confuse artistic consistency with narrative surprise. In the very obviousness of their ironic reversals, his endings are often the weakest parts of the tales. His detective stories are compelling in every way except as ‘whodunits’, and in horror tales like ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ or ‘The Black Cat’, the reader is swept along by the psychological or philosophical intensity and simply ignores the moralizing conclusions. Other tales disguise less well the mechanics of their plotting. In tone-poems like ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, the admirable stylistic unity cannot hide the fact that too much symbolic machinery is expended on the platitude that one cannot cheat Death. And Poe’s leisurely pacing can make for slow and attenuated tales: some readers find ‘Hop-Frog’ preachy and predictable, and the ironies of ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ can seem more arch with each rereading.

Poe’s indifference to character and plot is apparent even in the finest of the moral tales, ‘William Wilson’. An immoral man is haunted by a double who shares his name but not his dishonesty. The profligate’s hostility to this better self leads him to murder what he at last discovers to be his own conscience. While not a bad narrative idea, the purported ‘mystery’ of the second Wilson accounts for none of the tale’s power. There is no real suspense. Readers guess the double’s identity long before its ‘revelation’ in the final sentence. Nor is the moral particularly compelling. By the end of the tale, we find ourselves siding with the wastrel Wilson, and rejecting his alter ego as a tiresome nag. More important, it is hard to figure out exactly what that moral is. Although the name ‘Will, son of Will’ accuses the protagonist of wilfulness, the charge seems both trivial and a poor description of someone who wanders aimlessly throughout the story. Nor is it clear how his conscience represents a moral advance. Usually in doppelgänger stories, the double shows the central figure a new side to himself. In a highly moralistic version like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, a picture reveals the corruption that the protagonist attempts to hide. In Poe’s account, however, the twin teaches the narrator nothing about his inner nature, both because Wilson understands his villainy pretty well from the beginning and because he does not have much of an inner nature to understand. If anything, the tale’s allegory discomfortingly suggests that people’s desire to be good causes them to be bad.