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.
Insanity is what all of Poe’s stories boil down to. Insanity is going completely mad and not being able to make rational decisions. Mad people make decisions that are far from ordinary and can have dire consequences (America Mental Health.) In “The Raven” the narrator has gone insane around stanza ten. He goes from sadness and delusions to full insanity.
Poe is known for his spine chilling stories of which all have the same genre of horror. Both of Poe’s stories, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, display a person with a psychotic personality. In both of these stories the narrator let’s his aggravations get the best of him and persuade him to kill. Both narrators kill someone they love because of their insane thoughts. In The Tell-Tale Heart, the narrator loves the old man and doesn’t want to kill him but believes that he has to because of the old man’s evil eye.
In the “the black cat” by Edgar Allen Poe, the gothic fiction/ horror short story is about an untrustworthy narrator and how he relates to alcohol taking over his life, leading him to murder his cat, Pluto, and his wife. In the guilt of killing his cat, he buys a new one but kills in in anger. Some might say he was just insane but others would argue that he was guilty. From what happened, he was guilty by insanity. Because he hung his cat and murdered his wife, he definitely committed a crime, but I feel as if he could not tell what was right and what was wrong at the time.
The Raven, I found to be Poe’s odyssey into madness. This gradual descent is accomplished by his artful use of repetition. To begin, just take the last line of each stanza by looking at the words themselves, "and nothing more" hangs on the edge, looming darker and darker on the reader sensibilities as the poem progresses. "Only this", gives the reader the simple meaning of someone’s presence at the door, but sets the tone by repeating the words, “tapping and rapping” within the stanza, alluding hints of a mind prime for lunacy. The first use of the word, “gently” evokes a lightness or softness in the slight annoyance.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” a narrator shares the story of what led him to murder his wife. Throughout the composition, we learn of the narrator’s change in personality as time advances. From a happy child and loving husband, he becomes a bitter and hateful man who eventually begins to abuse his pets and wife. Even though at the beginning of his story he stated that “…mad am I not…,” one can surely tell that the man is not in a right state of mind (Poe 670). One could even say that the narrator is insane, or “In a state of mind which prevents normal perception, behaviour, or social interaction” (“Insane”).
Edgar Allan Poe once noted about insanity, “I do not suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.” Many of Poe’s readers may agree with his words because he includes many moments of insanity in his stories. Likewise, as Poe suffered from a great deal of tragedy during his lifetime such as the deaths of four family members, the reader may believe that his life was not the simplest and most pleasant. Although Poe’s short stories and poems seem quixotic, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Conqueror Worm” illustrate a direct reflection of how these events affected him in his lifetime.
Edgar Allan Poe had the most terrible, grotesque, pathetic, and heart wrenching life out of every well known American author. Poe’s tortured soul created what some argue to be some of the most celebrated and influential pieces of literature in American culture. His works are best known for their dark themes of death and insanity, contrasted with beauty. By looking into the life of Edgar Allan Poe, one can deduce the reasons behind his centralization on specifically dark elements. Edgar was born to a pair of traveling actors in Boston in January 19, 1809 but his parents died within three years of his birth and he was taken in by a family in Richmond (“Who Was Edgar Allan Poe”).
In the poem, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, the central idea is, the death of a loved one can lead to insanity. The central idea is developed through the writing strategy of characterization. The narrator becomes skeptical when he starts hearing noises at midnight. The narrator begins assuming the worst because he has experienced multiple deaths in his life, specifically the death of Lenore. Ultimately, his grief causes him to go insane.
On the other hand, the narrator is anxious, suspicious, and even claims he lacks a valid justification for killing the old man and has no clue how the thought came to him. This suggests that Poe was writing about a partially insane character. Poe undoubtedly incorporates elements of his own mental attitude, such as the utilisation of supernatural powers and death-related ideas, into his works. It's conceivable that Poe used the mystical elements to help him escape reality. By having a profound insight of the human mind and the extraordinary capacity to write from the viewpoint of an insane man, Poe's life might be seen to be represented in this narrative.
Around 1.5 to 3.5 percent of people in the world experience traits of psychosis (Calabrese). This behavior is observed in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most interesting stories. “The Black Cat,” by Poe, has a narrator who exhibits clear signs of psychosis, though, the narrator continuously claims he is not ill and what happened was entirely normal. This makes for an interesting debate if he truly is insane or not. Despite the narrator’s argument that murder was the simple result of cause and effect, Poe makes it clear in his writing that he is insane.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of criminal insanity, the first-person narrators confess unsound confessions. They control the narrative, which only allows us to see through their eyes. However, they do describe their own pathological or psychological actions so conscientiously that they exhibit their own insanity. They are usually incapable of stepping back from their narratives to detect their own madness. The narrator 's’ fluency is meticulous and often opulent.
“Insanity: n. mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior” (Hill). This definition describes the narrator, a sweet yet deadly man, of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe seamlessly. (Appositive) A few prominent characteristics demonstrate the narrator’s insanity, and those include his motives, his actions, and his thoughts.
“The Black Cat” was a story written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1845. The story tells a dark tale of a man’s love for animals and after heavy drinking turns tragic. The story tells the events leading up to and immediately after the murder of his cat and his wife. I believe that the most important word in this story is the word phantasm. Phantasm can mean illusion or a representation of a real object.
Edgar Allan Poe’s stories all have some type of mysterious setting that makes the reader read in between the lines and decipher the meaning. His stories also incorporate a great deal of violence and sinister acts, which adds a grimness to each story he tells. “The Black Cat” is a true work of literature that incorporates a hidden meaning in the story with the use of sinister violence. In this particular story, the narrator’s use of the first-person point of view, symbolism through the characters, and the eerie setting creates a fascinating tale. Edgar Allan Poe’s story is told from the first-person point of view.
