Crucial to understanding this question is the fact that it
is the speaker who narrates this tale. Poe is a master in using the unreliable narrator
to present unstable personalities, who are either mad, haunted or worse, and this
speaker in "The Raven" is no exception. Consider the situation. The speaker is a weary
student, studying in the early hours of the morning and is haunted with grief for his
former love who has died, Lenore. Hearing the rapping sound against the shutter, he
opens it and the raven flies in. The speaker begins to ask it questions, to which it
always replies "Nevermore." However, it is the speaker that is clearly driving himself
into ever-greater depths of depression and madness by his questions, knowing at some
level that the raven will always respond in the same
way:
"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!Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul
hath spoken!Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quite the bust
above my door!"
As his
questioning becomes ever-more frantic, we can see that he is almost delighting in
self-torture as he leads himself from initial curiosity to horror. This poem explores
the dark side of human nature, what Poe himself referred to as "that species of despair
which delights in self-torture." A psychologist would probably say that the speaker is
projecting (putting onto) the bird whatever his own wild, frenzied and grief-stricken
imagination throws out.
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