Comparing Poe's Eleonora And The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe was a gothic literary writer who lived in the early 1800’s. Edgar was praised for writing unique and original stories and poems on disturbing topics like suffering and death. Examples of these stories and poems include “Eleonora” and “The Raven” which are both about a man lamenting over the loss of his wife. These two tales are very similar but show a rare insight into the mind of Poe and how much his life affected his melancholy writing. One key concept of both of the stories are the similarities of the characters. Both stories have a male protagonist who is very distraught over his love’s death which Poe “calls the most poetical topic in the world.”(“Good Reads”). Both unnamed protagonists are in a very dark place in their

The themes of insanity, loss, and most importantly moving on. Both works have a protagonist that is deranged is some way. In “The Raven” it is quite obvious due to the main character having an open dialogue with a raven that has manifested in his house. It is also apparent in “Eleonora” when even the narrator claims that, “Men have called [him] mad” (“Eleonora”). At the end of “Eleonora”, Eleonora’s dead spirit manifests itself to speak to the narrator and forgives him for marrying again. Poe makes both men insane to emphasize that loss doesn 't just take an emotional toll, it also takes a mental one. Death is very important to these two stories because it is the main conflict with the two protagonists. Poe is emphasizing that death is random and it is incredibly powerful. He shows what happens to someone when they lose someone that meant a lot to them. Poe describes depression, bleakness, bargaining, but most of all acceptance. Poe writes the conclusions to both of the novels as acceptance because he wants people to know that the suffering only ends at acceptance. The death will always haunt people like when Eleonora comes back from the dead at the end of “Eleonora” but in the end the narrator accepts her death. At the end of “The Raven” the protagonist accepts his love 's death as well with the help of the raven when he tells him that he will never be together with his love again. Poe did not write these two stories to create creepy gothic stories, he wrote these two stories because it had a lot of meaning to him. He wrote the stories and imagined himself as the narrator in both stories because he too lost someone very important to