Sunday, October 23, 2011

What are your impressions of the narrator in "The Raven"?

My impression of the narrator is that he is a man who has recently lost his beloved, a woman he calls "Lenore," and in enduring her death, he is coming face to face with both it as well as his own mortality.  He is grief-stricken, so much so that, when he hears a knocking at this door at midnight and sees no one there, he immediately assumes that it is her spirit, returned.  The narrator is trying to move past his grief, to distract himself from it, but he cannot; this makes him quite sympathetic and pitiable because this is likely a situation to which many of us can relate.  Then, when a raven flies into his room, his first thought is a logical one: that the raven simply repeats, over and over, the only word that it knows.  However, from there, the narrator makes so many strange assumptions that I can only assume he is grappling with something far more significant than a weird bird, but that he is struggling to face and accept human mortality.

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