Edgar Allan Poe Ligeia Literary Analysis

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In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Ligeia”, Poe pens a bizarre story of a man who experiences life after death. The narrator, who is not named, is the main character who recalls the existence and passing of his first true love. Struggling with the loss over several years, he never forgets the passion and emotional connection the two experienced when she was alive. Only after his existence through an elusive and foggy state for a period of time, it is years later that he expresses the indescribable love he had toward Ligeia. This paper will examine how reincarnation challenges a person’s true ability to define love when they have a heavy heart because of the loss of their first love. We receive an unproven profound image of how Ligeia looked. …show more content…

For example, after the narrator lost his first wife; he roamed without direction until he settles into an abbey in a secluded section of England. As the narrator describes the interior of a chamber, we can perceive the room to be an elaborate room of gothic nature. The reader may ask, why such a gloomy and dark place, but, in reality, the narrator is setting the stage for what will happen. As the narrator explains, the room is “pentagonal in shape” (Poe 399) with a large window that had a “single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue” (Poe 399). Furthermore, the narrator also describes the chamber as, “[i]n each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite” (Poe 399). Oddly shaped and illuminated with a darken glow, the confines of the room further exemplify the depths of the narrator’s thoughts and despair. This magnifies the reader’s opinion that the narrators mind is deprived of intellectual thought and he only wants one thing, Ligeia. The room is mystifying much like the narrator; however, in his opium induced state, the narrator is oblivious as to why…and what it represents. This macabre scene that Poe sets is where Ligeia will be reincarnated, and is, in my opinion, where she returns upon the death of

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