Thesis For The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous poet who specialises in gothic style poetry. In his most famous poem The Raven he depicts a character who is at the edge of deep sleep when he is interrupted by a tapping at his door. Although when he goes to find the source of the sound he discovers there is nothing there, instead he hears another sound. This however turns out to be an ebony raven which becomes the centre point for the narrator 's monologue throughout the poem. The motive of The Raven is often debated amongst scholars, however my thesis on this poem is to argue for the state in which the narrator finds himself. Is what the protagonist experiences really all a dream, or is it all grand delusions a symptom of grief? Or is this the symptom of him becoming mentally unstable, which causes him to start hallucinating the events told in The Raven.

My first argument for why the narrator is in fact in a dream is the following. The poem starts with the narrator explaining that he is nearly napping. “Over many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded nearly napping, [...]” (stanza 1 line 2). Although, since there is no description of what is going on before the poem begins, we as readers do not know whether the narrator is transcending into a sleep mode or just waking up. In the same stanza, the narrator speaks

This is used in the context of the narrator looking out of his doorway and seeing nothing, no trees, no grass. All there is to him is nothingness and silence. This can be interpreted as a sign of a dream, because when you are in a dream you cannot see, feel or hear anything that is not directly within your scope of focus. Since this dream is focused on the interaction between the raven and the narrator and because the landscape outside the house is of no focus, this part gets lost and so the narrator explains it as