From the very opening of “The Raven,” it is never quite clear if the narrator is asleep, awake, or perhaps simply hallucinating. The ambiguity surrounding the raven’s arrival and whether the latter portion of the story occurs in a dream-like space or in the real world is stoked by the introduction of the tapping “visitor”:
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
If the narrator is asleep, then the increasingly fantastic imagery and dialogue with the Raven reflects the unreliable turmoil of the subconscious mind. If he is awake, then the story chronicles the narrator’s descent into madness. In either case, therefore, it is perpetually unclear what the reader should take at face value and what is happening at any given moment. The narrator of the “Raven” therefore epitomizes the unreliable narrator often found in works of the Gothic genre, and further reflects Poe’s tendency to chronicle the ravings of madmen.
