Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Okay so I was looking over the short stories and I think the one that left me with the most questions was "Ligeia" by Edgar Allen Poe. For one, I was wondering what that verse she read before she died actually means. I'm sure it has some sort of foreshadowing for how she was brought back to life or at least that it was going to happen, but I did not really understand it. Also, I was wondering why he married Rowena if he hated her so much. Maybe it's just me but if you don't like someone, how about you don't marry them? That was just one of those less pressing questions. One of the bigger questions I had was what the red fluid in the wine was. I feel like it's connected to how Ligeia came back or maybe he was just hallucinating since he was so high on opium. The part that really tripped me up was how Rowena kept dying and then coming back to life. Why not just die and have Ligeia come back? It was just sort of confusing. I also wanted to talk about how unreliable the narrator is. He's on opium! Even he says "I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium." I mean what if he imagined the whole thing and then he comes down from his high and neither Ligeia and Rowene were real and he's just an old cat-lady? or cat-man I guess. Regardless, this story was the one that confused me the most, but it was still just as interesting as the rest perhaps because it was so confusing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It seems to be a theme that Poe's narrators, at least in the stories we've read, are totally unreliable. You can't say whether or not they're completely off their rocker and imagined the whole thing, or they're completely off their rocker but it still happened anyway. I do like the image of him just being a crazy cat man though!
ReplyDeleteAgreed.
ReplyDelete