Overview
Students continue to engage with works by Edgar Allen Poe (“The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”) in order to determine narrator reliability. Students annotate the poems, isolating literary cues and tropes for unreliability in more complex literary texts. They use heuristics (following plot, characters, symbolism, unusual things, character map, and unreliability) to promote comprehension of the text. In the end, students develop an argument of judgment regarding the reliability of the narrator in “The Raven.”
Guiding Questions
- What makes a character unreliable? What makes a narrator unreliable?
- How do you know when someone (character or narrator) is telling the truth?
- What does the truth telling of the character say about him/her (in terms of an individual, his/her world-view and human-nature)?
Texts/Materials
- Copies of “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”
- Heuristics supports: Hints from the Text packet, Following the Plot, Following Characters, Interpreting Symbolism, Noticing Worksheet, Character Map
- iPoe Volume 1 & 2 [1 iPad per student]
Activities
1. Give students “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee.” Have students read the texts slowly as they are challenging, and there are multiple vocabulary words that may require attention. Students should have access to a dictionary. They can annotate to document their thinking, ask questions, react, clarify, and dialogue with the text. Also, provide students with the heuristics sheets to fill out as they read. 
2. Have students share their annotations and worksheet with a partner. Then, have students share out and discuss as a whole class, particularly focusing on issues around the reliability of the narrator.
3. If students have access to iPoe, have them independently examine the app. The teacher should facilitate around the room, asking students to share the ways in which the app is functioning differently than the text version of the story. The teacher can ask guiding questions as a means to encourage students to draw comparisons between the visuals they created in their mind as they read the text versus the visuals created by the app designer.
4. Students should write a synthesized essay regarding the reliability of narrators in Poe’s fiction. They should draw references across Poe’s texts as well as references from biographical information.
Assessment
The following are means of assessing students during activities so instruction can be adjusted and differentiated according to students’ needs.
- Annotation of “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee”
- Completion of Heuristics for comprehension of text
- Completion of synthesis across the works of Poe
- Documentation of visuals as a reader of the text