The oblong box
The oblong box ( English The Oblong Box ) is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe , which was first published on August 28, 1844 in the weekly paper Dollar Newspaper . The story is about a sea voyage and a mysterious box.
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The nameless protagonist and narrator books a crossing from Charleston to New York on Captain Hardy's parcel ship “Independence”. On the passenger list he discovers the name of the artist Cornelius Wyatt, with whom he has been friends since they were studying together.
Due to "existing circumstances", the departure of the "Independence" is postponed by one week. Wyatt has an elongated box as extra baggage on board. The narrator suspects that there is a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in the box . However, he wonders about the strange smell from the box, but attributes this to paint or tar. Wyatt's behavior is also striking: his earlier enthusiasm has given way to melancholy and he keeps his distance from the passengers.
Every evening around 11 a.m., Wyatt's wife leaves the cabin and goes into an extra cabin, where she stays until morning. The narrator thinks he hears his friend Wyatt knocking out the nails of the box with a wool-covered hammer in order to open it. Then he hears sobs or murmurs, which he interprets as an expression of Wyatt's artistic enthusiasm. At dawn the narrator again believes he can hear the nails hammering into their old holes.
On the seventh day at sea, when the Independence is in front of Cape Hatteras , a storm comes up that turns into a hurricane after two days and severely damages the ship. Most of the passengers are saved in a large dinghy, fourteen other passengers, including the narrator, Captain Hardy and Wyatt and his wife, take a seat in a dinghy at the stern of the parcel ship. Wyatt, however, still wants to get the long box off board the parcel ship onto the dinghy. When they try to dissuade him, he jumps into the sea to swim to the package ship. Once there, he grabs a rope in the lee , goes on board, pulls the box out of the cabin on deck , wraps a rope around himself and the box and throws himself into the sea with it, where he sinks faster than the narrator expected.
After four days, the dinghy lands in a bay across from Roanoke Island . One month after the sinking of the Independence, the narrator meets Captain Hardy and learns that Wyatt's wife died before the voyage. Wyatt wanted to deliver the body to his mother-in-law. Since many passengers had canceled the crossing because of a corpse on board, the coffin was disguised as passenger goods. Wyatt's servant played the role of the wife, the passage of which was already booked.
literature
- Edgar Allan Poe - Short stories in two volumes . Publishing house Fourier und Fertig, Wiesbaden 1965.
