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When you think about Dracula you probably think of his pointy fangs [Man dressed as Dracula stood outside a mansion]

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or his cape rather than say a big pile of documents but looking at how the novel's

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organized well maybe you should unlike a lot of stories which are either told by [Guys hanging out on a beach by a campfire]

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a narrator who is completely outside of the story or by a character whose part

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of the story Dracula doesn't follow either of these structures it's told not [An accountant turned author writing a Dracula novel]

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only through letters but all sorts of document telegrams diaries reports

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memoranda phonograph transcriptions old tic-tac-toe games well you know you name [A selection of old documents together]

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it and thank goodness it's published as a book instead of all those documents [Man drops lots of documents while riding on the bus]

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just stapled together and it'd be a nightmare to read on the bus anyway this

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isn't exactly new Dracula is one of many epistle's that is literary works written

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as a letter or as a series of letters you can find these works as far back as

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Ovidii Heroides a collection of poems presented as though they were written by [A greek heroine stood beside Ovidii Heroides]

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heroines of Greek and Roman mythology who were pretty ticked off at their ex's

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and even though people aren't big letter writers these days the epistle's [Boy using a quill to write a letter]

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tradition lives on some writers tell their stories entirely in email or text

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messages whatever it is people are using to communicate anyway back to dracula so

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we know that the novel is this big collection of miscellaneous documents

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but who put it together well our bet is on the mailman. Well, you gotta pass the [Mailman with lots of bags of letters]

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time somehow. But the novel almost gives us an answer whether you noticed

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or not there's an odd little note at the very beginning of the novel how

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these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the

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reading of them all needless matters have been eliminated so that a history [Portion of the Dracula novel recited]

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almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may

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stand forth as simple fact there is throughout no statement of past things

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where memory may err for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary

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given from the standpoint and within the range of [Continued reciting of a portion of the Dracula novel]

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knowledge of those who made them

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although this might be better than nothing it still has a lot of hole it's [Man looking puzzled by a hole in the ground]

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unsigned so we don't have a clear idea of who wrote the note, plus even though

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the note assures that needless matters have been eliminated and that the book

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contains no statement of past things where in memory may err well we know

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better than to trust the objectivity of anyone much less an unnamed editor who [A man hiding his face with a paper bag writing the Dracula novel]

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may or may not be hiding their head under a bag one thing that Dracula

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reminds us is that whatever the intentions of the editor sequencing and

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choosing have an effect on the story that's ultimately told we know this [Dracula falls down and a man looks confused]

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novel would have been really different if Dracula himself had been the one

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doing the document compiling and not just because he'd probably get a lot of

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blood stains on the pages [Woman holding a blood-stained book of Dracula written by Dracula himself]

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