Dr. Heidegger's Experiment

Although the narrator gives little information about himself, he functions as a character in his own right. As the storyteller, the narrator draws attention to himself at several points. For example, in the opening paragraph, the narrator addresses the reader as an “I” who speaks, saying, “I will merely hint, that Dr. Heidegger and all his four guests were sometimes thought to be a little beside themselves.” The narrator also says, in the same paragraph, that “[i]t is a circumstance worth mentioning” that the three old men were once lovers of the Widow Wycherly and had “once been on the point of cutting each other’s throats for her sake” (13). In this case, the narrator foreshadows the climactic scene of the story, when that very scenario repeats itself.

The narrator often takes a playful attitude toward parts of the tale that touch on the supernatural or pertain to the “thousand fantastic stories” that have been told about Dr. Heidegger. In this context, the narrator states, “Some of these fables [about Dr. Heidegger], to my shame be it spoken, might possibly be traced back to my own veracious self” (16). By referring to himself ironically as “veracious” yet as the origin of admittedly “fantastic” stories, the narrator situates the events told in this tale in an ambiguous realm—maybe they are fiction and maybe they are reality.