Michelle Spera Response to "Prison"

Right away, there is a degree of detective genre because there is a specific role to the characters in the jail cell. You would expect there to be a crime going on because of the way we are taught to think of people in jail. There are clues, but they are not presented in a way where they are simply found and analyzed; in fact, the clues in this story point in the wrong direction. While many of the elements of a traditional detective story are met, it is done a way that is very unique. There are still clues, suspects and the question of how this murder may have happened, but everything seems to be tied together in the end.

One way that it deviates from the genre of Edgar Allen Poe’s detective story, is that there are jobs these people have that seem to be out of the ordinary; one is an economist, prison officer, robber and detective. Although the robber fits, the economist seems a little out place. Unlike Poe’s story, we can see a motive and a reason for the crime, as opposed to Poe’s accidental slaughter. Each person in this story has an alibi, so it makes the story a little more interesting. The detective in this story is also not what we would generally expect. Poe’s prototypical detective solves the crime right away through analyzing each clue and discovering the seemingly impossible resolution. In “Prison”, the detective actually gets it wrong and the clues here cannot solve anything. This deviates most from the genre because it is usually expected that everything will come together and make sense at the end, even if that means placing an ape as the murderer.