From Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," is the Raven a bad person or a good person?

One way to
interpret characters in poetry is to analyze them both with a literal eye as well as a
figurative one. In Poe's "," a man sits grieving in his chamber over his lost love, .
The man is literally just a man who is grieving, but figuratively, he could represent anyone who
has lost a loved one. In the same way, the raven is literally a bird who accidentally flies into
the man's room. Figuratively, though, ravens have been messengers of truth in other tales, such
as the Grimm's Fairy . However, in the world of Poe, where insanity and darkness thrive on the
peculiar, the raven might represent the man's subconscious truth telling him to accept the fact
that Lenore is gone and to stop wallowing in grief. Therefore, the raven is neither good nor
bad; nor is he a person, but a raven, who symbolically attempts to reason with a desperate and
grieving man to accept his loss. If a person must be selected to be the antecedent of the raven,
then it would be the man's true consciousness striving to make him understand reality, accept
the truth, and let go of his grief.