The Raven Character Analysis

The Raven is a bird that enters the narrator’s house, while the narrator is grieving over his lost love in the middle of the night, and lands upon the narrator’s bust of Pallas. To everything the narrator says, the Raven responds with just one word: “Nevermore.” The bird acts in no other way, neither attacking the narrator nor seeming to wish him harm, but the narrator views it as at best supernatural and at worst demonic. Further, the narrator interprets the Raven's repeated “Nevermore” as a refusal of all his desires to be reunited with Lenore. At the end of the poem, the narrator observes that the Raven is still perched atop the bust of Pallas and will likely remain there forever, and that he will spend the rest of his life living under its evil influence. Whether the Raven is a supernatural being or a product of the narrator’s imagination is unclear, and in this way the poem creates a connection, typical of Gothic literature, between the subconscious and the supernatural.