The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay

“I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in an unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows” (Poe). In the exposition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the narrator travels to the house of his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, and in an attempt to rectify the rise of negative emotions, gazes at a small lake, at the reflection of the eerie house surrounded by dead trees. Like the narrator, who uses unorthodox methods to obtain a clearer image, Roderick Usher’s strange behavior, surrounding his twin sister and the forms of art that he partakes in, appear as madness, but actually reveal deep insight.

In the story, “The Fall of The House of Usher”, there are many mysterious happenings that go on throughout the story between the characters Roderick Usher and the narrator. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe uses themes such as madness and insanity to connect the house back to Roderick Usher. In the “Fall of The House of Usher”, the narrator goes through many different experiences when arriving to the house. The narrator’s experiences start out as almost unnoticeable in the beginning, turn into bigger ones right before his eyes, and end up becoming problems that cause deterioration of the mind and the house before the narrator even decides to do anything helpful for Roderick and his mental illness. In “The Fall of The

The Fall Of The House of Usher is a terrifying tale of the demise of the Usher family, whose inevitable doom is mirrored in the diseased and evil aura of the house and grounds. Poe uses elements of the gothic tale to create an atmosphere of terror. The decaying house is a metaphor for Roderick Usher’s mind, as well as his family line. The dreary landscape also reflects his personality. Poe also uses play on words to engage the reader to make predictions, or provide information. Poe has also set the story up to be intentionally ambiguous so that the reader is continually suspended between the real and the fantastic.

Poe has us question the reasons both for Roderick’s decision to contact the narrator in this time of need and the reason of the response that the narrator gave. While the author provides the obvious building blocks of the tale, he changes this standard form with a plot that is inexplicable, sudden, and full of unexpected disruptions. The Fall of the House of Usher begins without complete explanation of the narrator’s motives for arriving at the house of Usher, and this ambiguity sets the tone for a plot that continually blurs the real and the

Roderick Usher sends his childhood friend a letter, crying for company and good memories. As his friend passes the dark tarn and nears the House of Usher, all that is seen is a land of the dark and decaying. The Usher family within “The Fall of the House of Usher,” have lived in the house for generations, a house at one time filled “by good angels, (Being a) radiant palace-reared its head.”

“I must perish in this deplorable folly” (Poe par. 11). With this statement, Roderick Usher seems to be both accepting and sealing his fate. The “House of Usher” was once a mighty and well-respected family, but it has now dwindled down into almost nonexistence. Twins Roderick and Madeline are all that survive of this once proud race. A summons from Roderick to the unknown narrator of this story, a childhood friend of Roderick, sets the events in motion. He speaks of an illness and mental disorder which has become a great burden on him, and he wishes for the company of his dearest friend to help comfort and give “some alleviation of his malady” (Poe par. 2). As the narrator arrives at the family mansion, he is struck by the aura of “gloom”

The “House of Usher” draws parallels to Roderick’s condition, for both indicate fear and dullness. Upon entering the house, the narrator could immediately sense the “air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom [hanging] over and [pervading] all” (315). Such darkness is a key detail that explains how the house inflicts fear on the narrator. As a result, it is only fitting that Roderick’s condition originates from fear. The dreadful nature of the house is crucial, but its constantly changing state additionally embodies its ability to spread.

All these things put together and a few others help to connect the house to Roderick and Lady Madeline. When the narrator first sees Roderick after a long period of time, he thinks that he resembles that of a corpse. Then Roderick tells him the reason for his appearance, why he looks so bad. He said he had an illness that was a “morbid acuteness of the senses.” The word morbid, when used anywhere, has very strong meaning and it is of the negative type. He uses the word tortured when he is describing his eyesight and says that even the slightest sound is almost unbearable. Thinking about having all of these symptoms put together is a very bad picture to paint in your mind. His condition, in this case, is very comparable to that of the condition of the house.

In The Fall Of The House of Usher, Poe explores challenging themes, the most prominent of which is the theme of identity. Throughout the story, the narrator tells us of his experiences with what is left of the Usher family at their estate. The theme of identity is clearly stated right at

Though he is not truly a frightening man, little things such as his ghostly appearance and various disabilities that prevent him from everyday life such as severe sensitivity to light make him as a person unnerving and slightly disturbing. Even the narrator’s understanding of Roderick and the home are shown to be similar when he recalls that “the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling” (267). Not only are there various nooks and crannies in the mansion, but the narrator also understands that there are many things about Roderick that are so personal that he will never be able to understand him completely. Poe uses the narrator to show the audience that making connections between living and non-living

In “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe, an unnamed narrator is convened to a mansion that had a “sense of insufferable gloom” (poe) when seen. The man who summoned the narrator was a friend to who he had known as a child, Roderick Usher. Despite how the house gives him “an utter depression of the soul.” (poe ), he reunites with his boyhood friend. Roderick is experiencing exceptionally weird psychological disorder and his sister, Madeline is going to die on because of a mysterious infection.

The reader can have a sense of melancholy, fear, and depression as the narrator describes the circumstances in which he was summoned to the house. The reader can feel the melancholy, and mental state thru the owner of the house Roderick Usher, as he explains the illness that affected his sister. In times the narrator speaks as if Roderick was out of touch with reality, that he was lost in mourn, and despair. As the narrator tells us what Roderick says; “To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “ I shall perish”, said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost; I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the though of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.” (POE, The Fall of the House of

The truth of the characters in the story is revealed by the nature of the environment surrounding them. One such striking feature is isolation where the audience is exposed to a household that rarely interacts with the rest of the world. Usher’s house is but just an isolation and in fact, it becomes unusual when Roderick invites the narrator to their home. Death and decay has also been widely used as a setting of the story which shows the prowess the author had in employing key aspects of gothic literature (Timmerman and John, 170-172). In fact, the narrator constantly refers to the house as a ‘mansion of gloom’ showing the extent of decay present in the environment.

Poe describes the “ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous luster of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded” (Poe, 721). There is a steady sense during the narrator’s visit that nature is reclaiming the Usher house in the form of death and mold, and that the process is also addling the physical and mental systems of its inhabitants. Depressed, gloomy, and mooning about an ancient, creaking mansion built on unstable ground, the Ushers are also increasingly revealed as mad and perhaps even incestuous as the narrative goes on.

The narrator comes to the House to aid his dying friend, Roderick Usher. As he arrives at the House he comes upon an “aura of vacancy and decay… creating a pathologically depressive mood” (Cook). The state of the House is daunting to the narrator – he describes it with such features as “bleak walls”, “eye-like windows”, “rank sedges”, “decayed trees”, and “an utter depression of the soul”. These images foreshadow a less than pleasant future for the narrator and his dear friend Roderick. Poe continues to foreshadow the narrators turn of events with a description of the House’s “dark” and “comfortless” furniture. The House becomes a living hell for the narrator as he watches Roderick’s condition evolve and struggles to understand the mystery tying unfortunate events together. However, as the narrator gradually becomes more enveloped in Roderick and the House’s malady, he seems to develop a malady of his own. While the narrator’s illness is less prominent than that of Roderick and his sister Lady Madeline, the sicknesses are one in the same.