1. Narrator vs The Poet

The narrator's poem, like all poetry, has resulted in a progress towards self-knowledge: Alastor is a dramatisation of this progress. The narrator develops from one kind of death to another, from the death of those who feel no void within themselves, to the death of his hero, whose consciousness of this void leaves him suicidal. The narrator, aroused from one extreme, has created a fiction which precipitates him into the other. By the end of the poem he is sunk in 'pale despair and cold tranquillity,' exactly in the situation of his hero when he lay down to die. Shelley's preface describes only two kinds of people; those whose 'self-centred seclusion' brings them to speedy ruin, and the others, worse than they, the 'selfish, blind and torpid' who feel within themselves no insufficient void. In writing his poem the narrator has extricated himself but has succeeded only in joining the first category, in becoming one with his hero. He has progressed from selfishness to solipsism, from one kind of death to another. He is unable to take that further step which Shelley accomplishes so elegantly in his Essay on Love. He becomes a prisoner of his own fiction, the solipsistic world of mirrors in which his hero lived, from which there is no escape but in death.(Richard Cronin, Shelley's Poetic Thoughts, p. 93)

2. Starting with a hymn, he ends with and elegy

Interestingly, the Narrator also describes the Visionary¡¯s body as a ¡°dream / Of youth, which night and time have quenched for ever"(lines 665-670). Dying with the Visionary are the Narrator¡¯s former conceptions of his world. Through the course of his poem, the Narrator becomes increasingly dislocated from the Nature he praises at its beginning. Loss enters his vocabulary: starting with a hymn, he ends with an elegy. Such, perhaps, is what Shelley comes to see as the inevitable course of all poets of Nature. (Neil Freistat, "Poetic Quests and Questioning" in Shelley's Alastor Collection p.167)

3. Allusions to Wordsworth

Addressed in ¡°To Wordsworth" as ¡°Poet of Nature, the Wordsworth who weeps from learning that ¡°things depart which never may return" is similarly elegiac (line 2); and in a chilling ¡°correction" of the Intimations Ode that replaces a flower with a corpse, a deep joy with a profound sorrow, the Narrator contemplates the Visionary¡¯s body with a ¡°woe too ¡®deep for tears' "(line 713). Left only with ¡°pale despair and cold tranquillity" as his poem closes (line 718), the Narrator of ¡°Alastor" like his protagonist, comes to inhabit a world devoid of promise. Nor are their parallel fates coincidental. (Neil Freistat p.168)

4. Shelley on the narrator and the poet

The Poet is left without hope and without despair. The narrator is left without hope. In the face of his despair he can only hope to imitate the Poet¡¯s ¡°cold tranquillity." That at least is the frame of mind he struggles to achieve at the end of Alastor, as he contemplates the difference the Poet¡¯s life and death have made to his perception of the world. While the narrator is watching his hero, the author may be watching both hero and narrator with considerable urgency. Alastor is Shelley¡¯s criticism both of Wordsworth¡¯s ¡°something far more deeply interfused" and of a purely transcendent idealism. In his hands these opposing (and related) points of view interact to produce a peculiarly painful sort of intellectual irony. By pitting one against the other Shelley exhausts the possibilities of both. Shelley was determined to see love as the only proper relation between subject and object. In Alastor he demonstrates, however, that if love is too simply conceived (as love of Nature or as desire for some perfectly knowable ideal) it results in nothing but frustration. (Norman Thurston, "Author, Narrator, and Hero" in Shelley's Alastor, pp. 128-29)

4. The internalized Quest-romance leading to Solipsism

The movement of quest-romance, before its internalization by the High Romantics, was from nature to redeemed nature, the sanction of redemption being the gift of some external spiritual authority, sometimes magical. The Romantic movement is from nature to imagination's freedom (sometimes a reluctant freedom), and the imagination's freedom is frequently purgatorial, redemptive in direction but destructive of the social self. The high cost of Romantic internalization, that is, of finding paradises within a renovated man, shows itself in the arena of self-consciousness. The quest is to widen consciousness as well as to intensify it, but the quest is shadowed by a spirit that tends to narrow consciousness to an acute preoccupation with self.  This shadow of imagination is solipsism, what Shelley calls the Spirit of Solitude or Alastor, the avenging daimon who is baffled residue of the self, determined to be compensated for its loss of natural assurance, for having been awakened from the merely given condition that to Shelley, as to Blake, was but the sleep of death-in-life. Blake calls this spirit of solitude a Spectre, or the genuine Satan, the Thanatos or death instinct in every natural man. (Harold Bloom, "The Internalization of Quest-Romance")

5. The Transcendental novel: the Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode.

 The Bildungsroman in the High Romantic mode turns the transcendental postulate of a pre-established harmony between the ego and the world into (fictional) reality, i.e. it provides symbolic images and a symbolical form for a re-enchanted universe.  

The Characteristics of the Transcendental novel

1) Anti-mimetic

2) The open forms freely employing various types of writings.

3) Self-reflexivity

4) In their narration, their symbols, and their symbolical form, these novels present a symbolic picture of the universe, which is the exact antithesis to a mechanical and "disenchanted" view of the world. With poetic means only...these novels thry to re-build the symbolic view of the world which the Enlightenment and natural science had destroyed: a world, in which subject and object, man and nature, soul and body, natural and human history, are "related" in an emphatic sense of the world and in which their relationship does not rest on strife and the domination of one part by the other but on consubstantiality and mutual affinity. Character formation is thus but a metonymy of all forms of natural formation and of natural and human history as a whole. Quite often, it is modelled on the triadic scheme of paradise/fall/redemption, or of unity, division, unity regained at a higher level(Manfrend Engel, "Variants of the Romantic Bildungsroman" 276-77)