“The Gold Bug,” Part 1

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

“The Gold Bug”

Comment: Poe’s language can be hard to read. Indeed it can, he used a large vocabulary, and I suspect some of it was more widely used in his time (early to mid 19th century) than today. Please feel free to ask if you have any questions about what he means anywhere.

What’s the basic story?

• LeGrand loses his fortune and moves to an island
• LeGrand draws the narrator a picture of a bug he has just found, and the narrator thinks it’s a picture of a skull
• LeGrand starts behaving in strange ways that call his sanity into question
• But then LeGrand leads the narrator and Jupiter on a trip that ends in finding a buried treasure
• It turns out that LeGrand had found and decrypted a cipher message that led him to the treasure.

Who are the main characters? What are their main characteristics?

• LeGrand: The central character, and ex-slave-owner of Jupiter. He can be manic, and is fixated on the treasure hunt. Well-educated and upper class.
• Narrator. Cares about and likes LeGrand; also trusts him. Might be a doctor, although the one passage that implies that could be meant either literally or metaphorically (the wisdom of the Internet is that he is a doctor). More or less socially and educationally equivalent to LeGrand, although maybe slightly lower socioeconomic background.
  • Apart from his role as a character in the story, he is also a literary device through which the reader observes the action of the story.
• Jupiter. Technically a free Black man, but subservient to LeGrand, does his hard, dirty work. Poorly educated, unintelligent. Cares for LeGrand, chose to stay with him and refers to him as “master.” Or maybe he sees LeGrand as a sort of father figure. Superstitious, e.g., he’s afraid of the bug.
  • Jupiter also serves as a literary device, namely comic relief.

How plausible do you find Jupiter’s character?

• Many things about him seem implausible, for example a freed slave still serving his ex-master. He’s also a caricature, in terms of the way he speaks, his comic role, and his superstition.
• On the other hand, some of this could be plausible, for example after the Civil War many ex-slaves of necessity kept working for their ex-masters.
• Is the name “Jupiter” implausible, why would a slave or ex-slave be named for the chief Roman god? It turns out that in fact many slave-owners gave their slaves names from classical mythology, history, etc.

Next

Racial caricatures in American entertainment beyond “The Gold Bug.”

Please read the Web page about blackface minstrelsy at https://black-face.com/

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