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Suspense In The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

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Eileen Loebner Mynatt English II Honors 13 January 2023 Dreadful Anticipation Similar to his horrifying life, Edgar Allan Poe’s works evoke fear and dread in his readers. Poe terrifies readers with gloomy settings and terrifying characters that paint the picture of his unfortunate life. Readers are dragged along dreadfully anticipating what awful fiend or daunting place will represent Poe’s misfortune next. Edgar Allan Poe uses dark and mysterious settings, unknown and mentally unstable narrators, and horrifying characters and demons to create suspense and build anticipation. Poe sets the mood of anticipation through a setting shrouded in darkness and mystery, never quite revealing the narrator’s circumstances. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit …show more content…

In the beginning of Poe’s “The Raven,” the narrator trusts the raven and considers the bird a friend, thinking to himself that he is “blest with seeing bird” (190). However, after the raven tells the narrator he will never be happy again, he exclaims to the bird, “‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil–prophet still, if bird or devil!” (91). As soon as the raven proclaims the dreadful news to the narrator, he loses trust in the bird. He immediately turns against the raven and lashes out on him by referring to it as a “devil” (91). This rapid change of emotion leaves the reader at a loss for what the narrator might do next, thus creating tension. In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher believes he and the narrator have buried his sister alive, and claims he heard her struggles to escape: “I hear it, and have heard it. Long–long–long–many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it.” The sounds of his sister have built tension leading up to the reveal of the mysterious sound. Poe also withholds description of characters in his works to create suspense. Poole claims, “the understanding of supernatural events was left to the imagination of the reader.” Poe does this to manipulate the reader’s mind into creating the most horrifying character possible. The reader cannot help but dread what the character in their mind will do to …show more content…

The foundation of tension comes from the daunting settings of Poe’s works. He sets the mood for the story by setting the scene in dimly lit and gloomy places. Poe also adds tension by withholding information about the setting. Edgar Allan Poe’s works exemplify the importance of using setting to create

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When analyzing the characters presented in the tales, the reader will find that although they differ in motives and illnesses, they are both consumed by intense emotions and mental instability from significant circumstances that occurred in the past. In “The Raven,” the main character is portrayed as a lonely individual who is suffering from melancholic depression, coping with the loss of their previous lover, Lenore. Assumingly, the narrator's difficulty in coping with the loss of his deceased lover has led him to obsess over memories of her, ultimately provoking him to descend into a deep state of depression, obsession, and psychological suffering. In stanza six, Poe displays the narrator’s psychological state by writing: Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream

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The speaker firmly confirms this idea by using the word “Doubtless.” The fact that the speaker says the word doubtless aloud only helps him to make his assertion sounder to himself. Believing that the raven is not talking to him is a form of psychological projection. The narrator projects or propels his own emotions, in this case melancholy onto the raven’s owner as a defense mechanism to deny his own feelings of melancholy. This is an illustration of the classic defense mechanism of avoidance, used to circumvent the pain of

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As an aspiring writer, Poe used all the tricks that could possibly be used as a fiction writer. He used exclamation points, double-dashes, italics, repetition, and the capitalization of either the first letter of a word or the entire word; this is done so to increase the excitement of his gothic stories. Poe mostly sets his stories in a fantastical environment in order to distract his readers from modern-day references and push them into “the ideal and the beautiful”. Aside from the typical fantasy setting, he uses a kind of psychotic environment consisting of the term “claustrophobia”; like roomy yet airless solitary house, or a psychological prison of clearly deranged character. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s’ stories characters, they are usually dominated by their own emotions.

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He shows he is very lonely. When the author uses, "bleak," "dying," and "ghost" When he addresses the raven with many word choices it becomes more intense and extreme as the mood darkens to reflect of the misery of the speaker. Poe's metaphors and word choice help set the mood of the poem. "The Raven" best reflects on Edgar Allen Poe's sense of melancholy and gloominess. The setting, the bird and his word choice illustrate the darkness and the ominous mood.

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