Edgar Allan Poe Portrays Insanity In The Raven
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How Edgar Allan Poe Portrays Insanity in The Raven
A literary analysis by Viktor Wemmer - TE13C
The Raven is arguably Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous work and it has been both criticised and praised by people all around the world. It revolves around an unnamed narrator who was half reading, half sleeping while trying to forget about his lost love Lenore, tells us about how he during a bleak December notices someone tapping on his chamber door, but when he gets up to answer there is no one there. The same sound later is heard coming from his window, and a raven flies into his room when he proceeds to open it. The narrator asks for the Raven’s name, but the only answer he gets is “Nevermore”. As he continues to ask questions to it, he discovers that nevermore is the only thing the raven will say. The questions became more and more personal and filled with pain the further the poem progresses. Not getting any answers results in the narrator becoming more and more desperate and insane.
In this analysis I want to focus on how Poe’s writing in The Raven progressively gives the reader the feeling that the narrator turns insane. How does he create the progression from a seemingly normal man to an insane one?
Firstly I would like to start off with the effects of repeating the last line of each stanza in The Raven. Throughout the poem Poe follows the rhyme scheme ACBCCC ,which puts quite a heavy focus on the last lines of each stanza. Poe decided to use repetition quite heavily in