Interpretation Of The Poem Richard Cory By Edwin Arlington Robinson

In the short poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson dubbed, "Richard Cory" is a short poem about a man who seemed to have had it all and was happy with himself while the other townsfolk idolized him whenever he happened to pass them by. The narrator and the other common folk even go far as too describe him as someone almost ethereal in a sense that he was beaming brighter than everyone else when he walked through town. Eventually though on a seemingly clam summer night, Richard Cory took his own life for reasons unknown to the audience. Now that right there was only one possible interpretation of the story, albeit is probably the more common interpretation of the poem, it is only one interpretation nonetheless and in this essay I 'll be giving different …show more content…
Richard Cory 's mind could have been in total disarray and halucinating things or he could have been heavily under the influence of a "second voice" in his mind meaning that he would have been afflicted with Schizophrenia. There 's no indication of what exactly happened in Richard Cory 's past that could have caused him to become a Schizophrenic or halucinate things. The story could have been interpreted as a man named Richard Cory who halucinated that the people living around him were savages out to capture him and sacrifice him in some sort of bizarre satanic ritual. Then one day he had enough of living in fear of the savage locals living around him and decided that in order to escape the hellish nightmare that he perceived to have gone through every day, that the best course of action to do so is to take his own life with a gun shot to the head. This is just one way the story could have been interpreted through a "psychoanalytical lens" and that the another way is that perhaps instead of beloved Richard Cory having a mental disorder, the townsfolk could have all been hallucinating due to psychosis and saw Richard Cory as some sort of deity that lives among them and that he should be worshiped whenever they saw him, "we thought that he was everything / To make us wish that we were in his place" (Richard Cory 11-12). Eventually this pressure drove Richard Cory insane himself and with time resulted in his suicide at his house. This theory of Psychoanalyticism is focused more so on the psyche of the people in the story and how that could affect their actions in the story and use that to kind of explain why they did the things they did. The psychoanalytic lens offers so many more interpretations to the story that in turn creates many more possibilities for interpretation based on how the individual reader wants to perceive the story based on his own personal