Berenice

by

Edgar Allan Poe

Egaeus Character Analysis

Egaeus is the narrator and main character of this story. As a narrator, Egaeus is unreliable due to his self-professed mental illness. Egaeus does not share his family’s last name with the audience, implying that because his family is so ancient and well-respected, sharing their last name might tarnish their reputation. Egaeus was born in his family library (this also where his mother died) and he believes that’s why he was always so studious and introspective even as a small child. Egaeus also believes that he had a past life, the evidence of which is in the “remembrance of aerial forms—of spiritual and meaning eyes.” Presumably the only child of his parents, Egaeus was raised alongside his beautiful cousin, Berenice. Although he claims he never loved her, he was always interested in her as an object of study because of their striking differences. This interest only intensifies as Berenice falls ill with “a species of epilepsy,” and he becomes engaged to her to make her happy. Around the same time as Berenice becomes ill, Egaeus experiences a mental “stagnation” that grows into a mental illness of a “monomaniac character” that causes him to fixate on and obsess over minute details such as shadows or something in the margin of a book. One night, shortly before he is supposed to marry Berenice, he sees her smile at him and becomes obsessed with her teeth. As he fights the overwhelming desire to possess them, a maid finds Berenice unconscious and, believing her dead, tells Egaeus. Once Berenice is buried, Egaeus’s desire for her teeth eclipses his reason, and he exhumes her body and removes all of her teeth. Shortly after that, Egaeus regains consciousness in the library, but doesn’t remember what he did until the “menial” comes into the room and shows him.

Egaeus Quotes in Berenice

The Berenice quotes below are all either spoken by Egaeus or refer to Egaeus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Mental Illness and Physical Disease Theme Icon
).
Berenice Quotes

How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But, as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

Here died my mother. Herein I was born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous existence.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Library
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn—not the material of my every-day existence—but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 171-172
Explanation and Analysis:

I ill of health and buried in gloom—she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation—she roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

Disease—a fatal disease—fell like the simoom upon her frame, and even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! […] I knew her not—or knew her no longer as Berenice!

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Page Number: 173
Explanation and Analysis:

True to its own character, my disorder reveled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice—in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. […] I felt that their possession alone could ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Symbols: Berenice’s Teeth
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:

With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Symbols: Berenice’s Teeth
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Berenice LitChart as a printable PDF.
Berenice PDF

Egaeus Quotes in Berenice

The Berenice quotes below are all either spoken by Egaeus or refer to Egaeus. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Mental Illness and Physical Disease Theme Icon
).
Berenice Quotes

How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?—from the covenant of peace, a simile of sorrow? But, as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

Here died my mother. Herein I was born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before—that the soul has no previous existence.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Library
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:

The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn—not the material of my every-day existence—but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 171-172
Explanation and Analysis:

I ill of health and buried in gloom—she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation—she roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

Disease—a fatal disease—fell like the simoom upon her frame, and even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! […] I knew her not—or knew her no longer as Berenice!

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 172
Explanation and Analysis:

The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker)
Page Number: 173
Explanation and Analysis:

True to its own character, my disorder reveled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice—in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. […] I felt that their possession alone could ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Symbols: Berenice’s Teeth
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis:

With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white, and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.

Related Characters: Egaeus (speaker), Berenice
Related Symbols: Berenice’s Teeth
Page Number: 177
Explanation and Analysis: