ned. Finally, completely dominated by his perverse spirit, the narrator rushes madly through the heavily populated avenues to confess his crime to the authorities. He relates all that is needed to convict him of his crime, then falls "prostrate in a swoon." (275) Those whom Poe satirizes in "Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral" would likely find a moral in "The Imp..." They would avow that the narrator's guilt caused the confession. He was a bad egg, and, sonny boy, if you don't want to end up like him, you won't kill people. Moralists would completely ignore the narrator's explicit explanation of perversity at the story's outset, to insist that Poe tells herein a moral tale. It seems to this writer that we must give Poe credit for knowing what he was doing. If he presents a narrative in illustration of human perversity, the reader should take him at his word. But what of his confession? Is this not the voice of his conscience? Yes, assuredly, his confession is the utterance of conscience, but it is conscience in Poe's scheme, an agent of the perverse, revealing the "deep secret," the seed of annihilation residing in the human breast. It is not conscience which brings the individual into submission to a moral code. Perhaps the conditions which I described in the preceding paragraphs illustrate that creativity and perversity do, as Poe declared, walk hand-in-hand, just as do the attraction and repulsion motions of the universe. Consider the possibility that man's prolific creative genius necessarily must be just as abundantly perverse. Certainly this antipodality of action and reaction seems to follow the basic laws of Newton, as well as the oscillations manifested throughout the universe. But what prevents the individual from recognizing his own perversity in Poe's terms, as a primal force governing many of the activities of psyche? After Toby's debacle, I would not bet the devil my head, but could it be our own cultur...
