Examine the way in which the narrator of Poe’s The Raven tells the story. What does the narrator’s style of manner of narrating tell or reveal about the narrator himself?
The Raven is one of the first and most popular poems that famous American writer Edgar Allen Poe wrote. For a brief background about the poem, it is one that focuses on a conversation between a man and a raven. The poem starts by depicting a scenario wherein the man is sitting in chair in front of an open window, lamenting the loss of his love named Lenore, when suddenly a raven appeared and entered the room via the open window. The narrative started there although most of the significant interactions were performed by the man, who is also the narrator in the story, mainly because all that the Raven could respond with is the word “Nevermore”. Although the author, Edgar Allan Poe, originally intended to write the poem as a narrative, the outcome turned out to be significantly different because by technical definition, it can now be classified as an allegory or a poem that can be related to didacticism—mainly because of the nature of the conversation between the man—who is also the narrator, and the raven, using a unique theme that describes the conflict between the desire to remember and the desire to forget as the fuel that lights the thoughts and ideas of the narrator.
The narrator in the poem, based on how Poe described him, is a young scholar. It is however, important to note that this was not clearly specified in the poem. The narrator tells the story in a dramatic and melodic manner. Some of the factors that may have contributed to the narrator’s dramatic and melodic way of telling the story include his emotions when the events in the poem happened .
In the story, it can also be remembered that the only “stock and store” or the only word that the raven was able to say was Nevermore. Now, it is worthwhile to note that the narrator presumed that that word was the only word the raven was capable of saying because of a previous “unhappy’ master who may have also enjoyed the same routine of focusing too much on losses and experienced how it feels to have a conflict in remembering and forgetting. It is indeed surprising to learn that even with the presence of new company, which in this case is the raven, the narrator still exhibits his quality of receiving great pleasure from arousing feelings of loss as evidenced by the types of questions he asked the one-worded raven—questions that were purposes self-deprecating and those that further incite feelings that were associated with loss. The narrator focused too much in his loss and as Poe stated in his succeeding works, that type of personality is what led to the elevation of emotion in the story. In the poem, it can be said that the narrator began as a weak and weary person (as described by his mourning of the loss of Lenore); he then progressed into a state of regret and being grief-stricken—as evidenced by the types of questions that he asked the one-worded raven; until he could not take it any longer and he entered into a state of frenzy and then later on, being unable to control his emotion and triggered by his natural tendencies to focus too much on his loss, madness .
As mentioned earlier, the narrator is also the main character in the poem and so it can be very easy to tell the transition of his emotions and thoughts from being weak and weary, into a state of regret and being grief-stricken, and then later on into a state of frenzy and madness. It is also important to know that the trigger behind all of these transitions is the author’s tendencies to satiate the losses that have occurred in his life, continuously dwell and focus on it, without realizing that he is only causing self-inflicting pain. Because of the memories of a deceased woman who died, the emotions of the author became unable to free himself of being bind in her memories, which can be evidenced by his repetitive questions addressed to the raven about Lenore—if it believes Lenore exists in the afterlife, if there was a balm in Gilead, and if spiritual salvation is real and if Lenore’s spirits would have been saved by that time, among others. In conclusion, the narrator in The Raven tells his story by expressing his emotions of grief, sadness, and inability to escape the loss of Lenore, as evidenced by his overall conversation with himself and the one-worded raven.
Works Cited
Lanford, M. "Ravel and The Raven." The Realisation of an Inherited Aesthetic in Bolero (2011): 24.
Maligenc, C. "The Raven as an Elegiac Paraclausithyron." Poe Studies (2009): 87.
