Mental Disorder In Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” follows the story of a young man who is sadden by the death of a woman named Leonore. As the reader advance through the poem, the main character is getting more and more emotionally unstable. He is clearly suffering from some kind of mental illness most likely depression. The narrator is in first person, we are living the poem through the eyes of the main character. (He compulsorily constructs self-destructive meaning around a raven’s repetition of the word 'Nevermore ', until he finally despairs of being reunited with his beloved Lenore in another world. Just because of the nightmarish effect, the poem cannot be called an elegy.) Poe use vivid details to describe how the narrator is gradually losing his mind. …show more content…

Poe recurred to Personification to give human qualities to the raven. The main example is the ability of the raven to talk and Poe ilustarte it "as if his soul in that one word he did outpour"(932). Ravnes are uncapable of talking from their soul because usually people believe that only human beings have a souls, so giving the raven a soul is a use of personification. Also, the raven demostrated "mien of lord or lady"(932). Mien is a human quality of showing your mood through a look or a manner. Through history, ravens have had negative connotation. They are seen as a "thing of evil!" (933). Now, everyone knows that birds are capable of emitting sounds, but they cannot talk in a meaningful way. However, the unnamed narrator hear the raven saying the word nevermore constantly. This could mean two things. Firstly, it was just a normal response because he was "weak and weary" (931), or secondly, he had a mental illness that causes him to hear voices. Either way, it seems like his subconscious was trying to tell him something through the raven. In his case was the word nevermore. Consequently, the raven was a constant reminder that he will never see Lenore

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