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Poe's “The Oval Portrait” is set up in terms of a series that makes narrator, portrait, artist, and the author equivalent. It is structured in a circle: from his wife, the artist creates the portrait, which revivifies the narrator who, as Poe, becomes the artist creating the story. In terms of both theme and structure, the story expresses the principle put forth in “Eureka”: the universe consists of infinite, individualized variations of an original primordial particle which both encompasses the variations and is contained in them.
The story begins with one of Poe's gothic settings and narrows to a bedroom with pictures. The picture of the narrator is a figure lying in bed, looking at pictures. The chateau frames the room, which in turn frames the narrator, especially after his servant Pedro closes the heavy shutters and frames him in further. As the narrator is surrounded by “rich,” “antique” tapestries and four poster bed, so is the oval portrait edged by a “richly gilded and filigreed and moresque” frame. Further, the position of the narrator in the castle is reflective of that of the portrait in the room. The valet and the narrator establish themselves in a small room which “lay in a remote turret of the building.” Similarly, the portrait at first was not noticed because it “fell within a niche of the room which had hithertoo been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed posts.”
A further parallel between the narrator and the portrait is that both the narrator and the young girl in the portrait are wounded. The narrator enters the chateau in a “desperately wounded” condition; the girl, by the end of the story, seems symbolically and literally to have bled to death: “the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him.” Throughout the story, the narrator is pictured passively lying in bed; Pedro is the active figure making forcible entry into the chateau. The narrator is confined to contemplating, reading, and gazing. His