“The Raven”- An Artfully Crafted Narrative
When people think of gothic stories many think of haunted houses, curses, ghosts, and so on, but Edgar Allan Poe focuses on a different type of darkness. Edgar Allan Poe is a gothic short story writer from the 19th century, who struggled with his depression, due to losing his mom and wife to disease. While Poe’s gothic stories consisted of supernatural elements, the main focus of his pieces was the darkness of the human mind. Poe shared the darkness of his own mind, by writing his narratives with the topics of insanity, grief, and death, as seen in “The Raven.” “The Raven” consists of a speaker that is haunted by his everlasting grief, from losing his loved one Lenore. Edgar Allan Poe, like many authors, strived to write an expert narrative, which he defines through his “Philosophy of Composition” as required to have, “ ... as regards to length, to all works
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REASONING: The raven is an element of complexity, as it holds symbolism to the grief the narrator is feeling over his lost Lenore. As seen in the quotes above at the beginning of the short story, the narrator had hope of seeing Lenore again after hearing a weary sound outside of his chamber, he demonstrates that by calling out her dear name in the darkness of the night. However, as his grief came over him, with the thought that it was not his Lenore, the raven appeared and began to haunt him. By doing so the narrator lost all hope of seeing Lenore again as demonstrated by the second quote. The raven in the narrative is not the only complex element of the story, Edgar A. Poe also used the narrator's increasing amount of grief and pain (though extreme) to help demonstrate to readers that the pain of losing someone can’t just go away. Poe’s use of the raven to symbolize the grief that the narrator was feeling about his loved one, Lenore, exemplifies the complexity used in “The Raven” to accomplish the works of an expert