The Unreliable Narrator In Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven

Edgar Allen Poe was and is a famous American writer who typically wrote short stories and poems; Poe’s works are usually gothic (a sub category of Romanticism, which focuses on uncertainty and dark elements) and are often told by a narrator. Narrators in short stories, poems, or other literary works often unwittingly tell the audience quite a lot about themselves through their word choices, and their mood which can make them unreliable narrators; this is especially true in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. When reading “The Raven” it becomes apparent that the narrator (whom we do not know the name of) feels paranoid, melancholic, and even guilty of the loss of someone dear to him that had happened prior to the poem; and that the narrator seems to want to continue to feel dreadful and guilty which causes him to be an unreliable narrator. This is shown through the narrator’s unstable mental state, the poem’s unusual rhyme scheme, and the narrator’s guilt. I will argue throughout this essay that the narrator’s quick descent into insanity …show more content…
The use of alliteration, assonance, and the repetition of words, allows the poem to successfully mimic the mood and instability of the narrator as he mentally declines into insanity and depression. The complex rhyming and structure of the poem in lines such as ““Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—/Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”” (97-98) coupled with the fact that he is shrieking at the bird and accusing it of being a “devil” (85) sent to torment or haunt him also supports the unreliability of the narrator as he is clearly having a mental