![]() ![]() ![]() The narrator cannot remember Ligeia’s surname, for example, nor can he recall the name of the city where they met these lapses seem distinctly odd in the narrative of an undying love. Poe leaves many of the details of the story mysterious and unresolved. The suspense builds incrementally, and only when we see that Ligeia has entered Rowena’s body do we realize the many questions the narrative raises. We notice Poe’s careful references to the narrator’s opium habit and the overly rich, sensuous gloom in the castle apartment in which he and Rowena live, but feel mesmerized by the narrator’s description of Ligeia. Having remarried, he treats his second wife abominably as he recalls for the readers the history of his relationship with Ligeia. Clearly the narrator is obsessed with Ligeia. This powerful tale about Ligeia, a strong-willed woman who wills herself back to life in the body of Rowena, the narrator’s second wife, may be read, as critic Gordon Weaver observes, as a story of either madness or the occult (Current-García 67). In the tale Poe also makes use of the unreliable narrator whom the reader must constantly distrust. In a tightly knit plot that relies on sensational incidents, the narrator’s sharp focus on Ligeia leads to the stunning and ambiguous denouement. ![]() It achieves Poe’s goal of the “single effect” through the narrator’s focus on Ligeia, his deceased wife. Suffused with a gloom reminiscent of that of “ The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia” remains one of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known stories. ![]()
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