The book: The Man Who Was Poe, written by Avi, is a story about the main character, Edmund attempting to search for his missing Aunt, Sister and Mother. When he bumps into a man whose name is Dupin; feeling sympathetic for Edmund, he offers his guidance to him. As Edmund and Dupin are working to discover what happened, Edmund realizes that the most likely scenarios are that they all died.
“Story of a search . . . boy searching for vanished sister . . . wants her to be alive . . . of course . . . no tension there . . . to be effective must be a puzzle . . . is she alive? . . . Enter Dupin . . . Who took her? . . . much confusion . . . but then, boy finds that . . . One can find life only through death. I know. My sis is dead too. (PG. 80)
This quote on page 80 serves as a sort of recap of the plot of this story. This quote has two lines which I find very intriguing. the first being “To be effective must be a puzzle.”. I believe that this small section of text means in plain language that in order to succeed you must solve all the problems you are faced with. I believe that this is the most likely meaning of this sentence, but there is a large possibility that it could be conveying other messages Aswell. The second line which I found interesting, was “One can find life only through death”. My interpretation of this quote is that one can only strive after going through what feels like death. but there are many other explanations of this. Another interpretation of this quote is the possibility that “death” in this sense could mean the death of your old self. So, one can only find change by killing their old self. Overall, I think this quote was remarkably interesting and was a puzzle in of itself.