In addition to omitting local explanations for abnormal behavior, Poe's unreliable narrators often try to explain strange occurrences in a rational manner before losing control over their thoughts and succumbing to the significance of the supernatural. This detail reveals the extent of his fixation upon her memory and causes us to suspect that his largely sweet and innocent account of pure love actually hides a highly unbalanced mind. Furthermore, he concludes the poem in a peaceful and optimistic tone as he explains calmly that he sleeps every night beside her tomb on the seashore. One of the clearest examples of this disconnect between the rational mind and the obsessed mind appears in the poem " Annabel Lee," where the narrator displays signs of paranoia in his suspicions of a conspiracy between Annabel Lee's highborn kinsmen, the jealous angels in Heaven, and nature itself in causing her death. In Poe's works, a standard sign of the narrator's possible lack of sanity is his inability to question his own bizarre behavior. Similarly, although Poe's poetic works are less focused on murder than many of his short stories, questions about the supernatural and about reality continue to pervade our understanding of Poe's poems, many of which are also told in the first person. In all cases, Poe employs the first-person point of view in order to prevent knowledge of other potential points of view. ![]() For instance, the narrators of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and " The Black Cat" insist upon their sanity as a preface before providing a chilling interpretation of the criminal mind, while the protagonist's opium addiction in "Ligeia" casts doubts upon the extent of the supernatural in his experiences after the death of his first wife Ligeia. Many of Poe's short stories are effective in their portrayal of terror and madness precisely because the narrators of these stories cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
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