The Unreliable Narrator In The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

The mood of the poem "The Raven" can be described in many words. In a single word, it can be considered "Gothic”. More specifically, however, the mood is mysterious, melancholy, and even slightly morbid. Edgar Allan Poe created the mysterious mood in his poem by using figurative language, imagery, setting, tone, and the speaker to help enhance his writing.

In today’s world, the news is constantly shrouded in controversy. Stories of violence and crime are everywhere. Hidden amongst the plethora of articles, there’s bound to be a report without a shred of truth in it. As smart as people like to think they are, mistakes in judgement do occur from time to time. A mere glimpse of a shocking headline is enough to throw someone off. Given enough intimidating and persuasive words, it can be quite easy to mislead someone. When a person is overcome with emotion, it can be even more difficult to distinguish what is real or not. Edgar Allan Poe’s most prominent poem, “The Raven,” gives an example. In “The Raven,” the Raven is not actually real, but rather, it is a manifestation of the speaker’s built up vexation; this is relevant to 2017, since people are easily deceived when they are frustrated.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in 1809, is a critic, mystery and short story writer, but most importantly a poet. Edgar’s troubled life greatly influenced his works. As a young boy, Edgar loved to compose poems for his loved ones. But as he grew older, Edgar started to experience pains and tragedies in life, causing him to abuse on opium and alcohol. These were scenes behind the years of Edgar’s dark writings.

Edgar Allen Poe, a master of suspense, wrote stories over a hundred and fifty years ago that remain popular today. One of Poe’s suspense techniques in these short stories are unreliable characters. An unreliable character is a character, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. The unreliable narrator forces the reader to ask questions like, “Is this true?” rather than “Who did it?” or “What happened?” Poe uses unreliable characters in many of his stories very effectively to keep the reader guessing what is ultimately true. Three of his most famous stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death”. He illustrated how effective such narration is.

Edgar Allen Poe is an author that contributed an abundance amount of knowledge and passion to American literature through his books and short stories. He was one of the first authors who made his living through writing alone. This resulted in a great deal of financial hardships in which he had to learn to prevail through and continue to write stories and books that contributed to American Literature as a whole. Through these hardships he gained a great deal of compassion for his work and for the lives he created through his novels.

In his poems and stories, Edgar Allen Poe often returns to the same themes: loneliness, lost love, insanity, and depression. In his poem, “The Raven”, his theme is grief, which is also related to the string of themes he usually incorporates into his works. However, for this specific poem, Poe uses an abundant amount of literary devices to expand on his theme of grief and describe it in a way that readers will be able to understand his feelings throughout this poem. There are many literary devices like alliteration, different types of imagery, assonance, symbolism, metaphors, similes, and more. So in some reader’s opinion, Edgar Allen Poe uses the theme of grief to draw the reader’s interest in his poem, “The Raven”. Poe uses symbolism,

In the passage “Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” both by Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Raven” the narrator was driven to madness by a Raven.”The Raven” has a melancholic tone. In the “Tell-Tale Heart” the narrator murders the old man, who he takes care of. Both narrators feared the unknown which made both stories more mysterious.Both “The Raven” and “Tell-Tale Heart” deal with literary devices to describe the tone, but they do so in different ways.

Edgar Allan Poe is the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career. Who was also an editor, and literary critic most prominent for his poetry and obscure stories in American literature. Poe was considered the inventor of detective fiction and was also the first to master the short story form. Poe was an orphan, due to death of his parents and separation o63+f his siblings at a young age. Poe given the Allan family, but not formally.

Edgar Allen Poe often uses first person unnamed narrators. Some are reliable and some are not. First person is when the narrative is presented directly from the main characters point of view. A reliable narrator is “a narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised”. An unreliable narrator is “A narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised”.

Edgar Allan Poe was a phenomenal short story author. He now is nationally renowned as a result of his works. He did not just come up with some of these stories on his own accord though, rather he lived some of these stories. Edgar Allan Poe’s literature was greatly influenced by his experiences in life. To shed some light on the facets of his life that are seen in his stories, some background information on Poe’s past will be brought to light.

Poe began to write with more feeling and extracted the familiarities in his life to paper. “The Tell Tale Heart” Poe expresses what his own heart may have felt, insane; or felt that others judged him as insane or thought that he was insane. In “The Tell Tale Heart” Poe used his pain and imagination take place to create a thrilling, heart racing short story unlike no other. The narrator’s insanity was shown through his thoughts and action of the old man and the eye. Poe wrote another short story of another narrator filled with insanity, “The Cask of Amontillado.” Like in “The Tell Tale Heart,” he had an insane, murderous character, only this one was plotting his revenge, Montresor. Montresor leisurely let his victim, Fortunato, become drunk, and as he was acting welcoming, led his victim to his death deep underground, and slowly let him suffocate chained up. As this occurred, Montresor took pleasure in the man’s screams. “The Cask of Amontillado” demonstrates Poe’s creative aspects, but may also indicate his that he was jealous writers. In his poem, “The Raven” the narrator is trying to forget his lost love. Poe lost Virginia, his love, and when coping with her death, he wrote

Influenced by the many disappointments in life, people seek comfort in different ways. The American author Edgar Allan Poe was living a sad life and was let down by many people. Miserable and depressed, Poe was still able to create the most wonderful and capturing stories. Poe co-shaped the genres science fiction and detective fiction, and was one of the few people at the time that wrote short stories. The many obstacles he faced during his abrupt life, contributed to make him become a literary critic.

The symbolic representations of the heart and the raven reveal the hidden theme about the changes and actions people can commit due to guilt or grief. His comparison within his stories expresses events or objects such as the raven or the “Vulture eye” affecting the characters. The emphasis created by parallel episodes creates suspense and drama in his stories and vividly describe the character’s emotions. Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” and his poem “The Raven” are vastly different in content and messages, but after thorough analysis, it is clear he uses certain literary devices to enrich his stories and improve his fan’s

The narrator in “The Raven” is a grieving man in the beginning of the poem, but by its end, he is a complete madman. He is not portrayed as a completely irrational individual, but his behaviour is suspicious enough to notice his wavering sense of state. For example, the phrase “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” suggests that he is not reading a science-based book because lore is about mythology and legends passed down from one person to another (Poe 2). Moreover, the lore is described as “quaint" and “forgotten”, suggesting that it was extremely ancient and speculative (Poe 2). In addition, his grief over his lost love while reading “curious” lore further indicates his unstable state of mind because lore is not involved with healing

Edgar Allan Poe was a reticent man, he kept to himself, wrote poetry alone. His poems tended to be on the more dark and disturbing scale rather than loving and up beat poems. He was thought of as insane and dark, he constantly wrote about death and tragedies. In my essay I will be analyzing Poe and his poetry.