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Reading Poe¡¦s ¡§The Purloined Letter¡¨ The central concern in reading Poe¡¦s ¡§The Purloined Letter¡¨ lies in the very purloined letter in question: how it is displaced from its assigned origin and, since ¡§a letter always arrives at its destination¡¨ as Lacan believes, how it must be redirected back to its proper end. The purloined letter might then be seen as the ¡§center¡¨ of the story ¡§The Purloined Letter,¡¨ and the whole narrative a structure in search of its missing center. Is the search a successful one? This is the question I would like to discuss. The Prefect¡¦s search is a disastrous failure, and to account for his failure I turn to Derrida¡¦s ideas of structure. According to Derrida, philosophy with its reliance on ¡§the determination of Being as presence¡¨ has rendered a structure without a center thinkable. There is always a transcendental signified, an authorizing center, and in order to set up the anchoring point to which our language, experience, and thought can refer, an organized structure must be built up first to bind things into a closed hierarchy. The either/or principle of non-contradiction is then employed to supervise the establishment of such a hierarchical s