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Monologue In Poe's The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

Decent Essays

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous poet who specialises in gothic style poetry. In his most famous poem The Raven he depicts a character who is at the edge of deep sleep when he is interrupted by a tapping at his door. Although when he goes to find the source of the sound he discovers there is nothing there, instead he hears another sound. This however turns out to be an ebony raven which becomes the centre point for the narrator's monologue throughout the poem. The motive of The Raven is often debated amongst scholars, however my thesis on this poem is to argue for the state in which the narrator finds himself. Is what the protagonist experiences really all a dream, or is it all grand delusions a symptom of grief? Or is this the symptom of him becoming …show more content…

This is used in the context of the narrator looking out of his doorway and seeing nothing, no trees, no grass. All there is to him is nothingness and silence. This can be interpreted as a sign of a dream, because when you are in a dream you cannot see, feel or hear anything that is not directly within your scope of focus. Since this dream is focused on the interaction between the raven and the narrator and because the landscape outside the house is of no focus, this part gets lost and so the narrator explains it as nothingness. The theme of nothingness is repeated several times throughout the poem with the quote “This it is, and nothing more,'” (Stanza 8, line 6). This points to it that the whole incident could be a dream since the raven only says the absolute minimum possible due to the narrator not remembering the rest because it was not important, therefore not within his focus and so the narrator would not be able to recall this.

As previously mentioned, the author of this poem, Edgar Allan Poe, was notorious for his ghost stories and so his poems and works might have been made as a tribute to the ghastly, unknown world of the undead. This would then disprove the idea that it was a dream and instead point towards the poem being a story of ghost encounters. There is also sequences when all seems normal “And each separate ember wrought its ghost

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