The Creations of a Madman
What is madness? In the mind of a murderer it means nothing, but in the mind of any regular person it means insanity, and it means that the person is so out of their mind that they kill people and do other sorts of ludicrous actions. In his poem “The Raven” and his short stories “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe allows his readers to visualize madness through his characters’ insanity and distress. The speaker of Poe’s “The Raven” appears to readers as a man who is merely answering a knock on his door. Throughout the poem the speaker hears more and more noises until a visitor startles him. Then, in the middle of the poem, opening his shutter, the narrator sees his fate: “Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore”(46). After he meets the raven, readers notice that the speaker becomes increasingly obsessed with the black bird as the speaker slowly leads himself into becoming insane.