Critical Essay on, "The Fall of the House of Usher."

The house seems to be absorbing Usher’s mental health and physical health. Evidence of this is shown by the faltering health and growing fears of Roderick Usher in relation to the growing scariness 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

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 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.

The downfalls of Roderick and the narrator juxtapose in order to emphasize the House’s true reign over the characters. The House began haunting the narrator from the moment he first viewed it. Yet it seems only to disturb him in subtle ways whereas Roderick, a resident of the House, seems to be degenerating at a pace similar to it. Just as the

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allen Poe challenges the reader to discover the role of fear. Poe’s creation gives off multiple feelings of apprehension; therefore making the true reality of his piece unclear. Set in a disturbing environment, Poe uses gruesome imagery and mentally unstable characters to bring out fear, and raises questions of fear’s ability to alter perception. When the narrator first approaches the House of Usher, he takes the time to observe all of the house’s features.

At first, the erratic, ambiguous, and disorientating narrative style of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ seems to lack consistent symbolism, and can be understood as a convention of the gothic genre. Macabre texts often employ unreliable narrators to convey readers down circuitous paths littered with false steps and red herrings, in order to postpone, and perhaps even prevent, arrival at singular interpretations of stories. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the narrator suddenly and ambiguously reveals facts about the house and its inhabitants, and couches his observations in ornate and turgid language. These features seem superfluous, but force readers to collude in the mysterious, entertaining and infinite game of engineered interpretation that the gothic genre revels in. Nevertheless, a second reading of the text reveals uncanny similarities between the narrator and Roderick– both men ultimately share a belief in “the sentience of all vegetable things” (185), possess the power to distort the distinction between art and reality, and suffer from “a morbid acuteness of the senses” (181). This suggests that the malady plaguing the surviving branches of the Usher family has infected the narrator. Therefore, the perplexing, and oftentimes infuriating narrative style of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ reflects both authorial manipulation essential to create a suspenseful gothic tale, and also unconscious manipulation by the mentally disturbed narrator (itself a gothic

When someone leaves the world mentally and they begin to create their own world, their mind starts to deteriorate and they become very detached from reality. “The Fall of the House of Usher” was written in 1839 by a well known author of gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe. This story begins with a man, who is not named, who receives a letter from a friend of his, Roderick Usher, that he is ill and wants the narrator to come to the house. When the narrator arrives, he begins to learn a lot of strange situations and incidences about the family and the house. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the house represents the collapsing of the family because the house is falling apart it seems the family is too.

Have you ever been to a house that was strange or spooky? Well the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher can tell you about his experience when meeting Roderick, his childhood friend. It couldn’t stand after the inhabitants were dead. The house was decaying when only two people were living in it. Owners of the home were confused as to how it got that way. Roderick’s death brought the home to crumbles after seeing his sister. The house cannot stand after the inhabitants are deceased in that, it was decaying, the inhabitants were confused, and Roderick’s death made the house crumble.

While the structure of the building as a whole did not have any problems, individual components that help up the infrastructure contributed to the decaying and imminent collapse. Once the narrator enters the home, he finds out that the family who lived inside of it was also sick. Individuals who lived nearby conflated the phrase “House of Usher” with both the family and the building—suggesting that the house functioned as a trope for mental illness or a cognitive/physical malady—thereby rendering the house itself a vampire. The narrator describes the nefarious nature of the Usher house, as it evokes a “sense of insufferable gloom” at first sight, which intensifies as he approaches closer and closer to Roderick’s abode. The narrator further states that he felt as though the Usher house suffocated those who lived in it and/or came into contact with it while also stripping visitors such as

Edger Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” tells the Gothic and hunting story of a friend’s failed attempt to help another friend. The story’s vague start describing a deteriorating house gives an eerie feeling to the story. Soon the narrator finds himself betwixt an interesting familial dynamic of a brother and sister of the Usher family. With both siblings affected with mysterious illnesses, death soon finds the sister Madeline while Roderick Usher continues to suffer mentally. Madeline’s ghostly return after being entombed alive by her brother, and the house crumbling to the ground climatically ends the tale. From the haunted setting to the supernatural occurrences the story definitely does not lack a dull moment.

The story is not just the story of a murder case. “It is rather a representation of the experience of dread, as Poe understood this feeling” (Quinn). The story is told from the nameless narrator’s point of view. Few details are known other than he is a childhood friend of Roderick’s. The narrator is not the main character, rather it is Roderick, because it just tells what he observes The story is not told in typical Poe fashion “…where the protagonist tells a personal account of a crime that he or she committed. Instead, the narrator acts like a participant/observer (Womack “Usher“). Roderick along with his sister, Madeline, are “the sole, remaining members of the long time-honored Usher race“ (“Usher“). The Usher race has throughout their existence has been inter-married, thus suggesting their serious illnesses can be attributed to their lineage. “Due to limited medical knowledge or to suit the story, Poe treats Madeline and Roderick as identical twins; two parts of one personality. He implies that they are so close that they can sense what is happening to each other (“Usher“). Their illness can be connected by “…his mental disintegration to her physical paralysis” (“Usher“). Poe explores “the inner workings of the human imagination but, at the same time, cautions the reader about the destructive dangers within” (“Usher“). When fantasy suppresses reality and the physical self, as with Roderick, what results is

In the beginning of this upbeat tale, it is revealed that Roderick Usher has fallen sick and is soon expected to die; however, during his final moments, he wishes to be kept company by his boyhood companion, the nameless narrator. Also, the Usher family tree does not branch off, but instead keeps a single line of lineage. When the narrator first arrives, he is portrayed as an intelligent man with a keen eye for detail, as his thoughts are expressed in great detail by just what he catches at first glance. In short the narrator describes the Usher estate as “In a state of extraordinary dilapidation” (Price, 24). Additionally, with a “Perceptible fissure extending from roof, to wall, to ground” (24). This is only the beginning of the problems that lie within the house.

When Roderick was a boy, he had a cadaverous complexion, a delicate nose, soft hair, and an luminous vibe to him. Poe uses looks to describe him. Roderick now has the appearance of a “ghastly pallor of the skin…[and] silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded” (8) which shows the transformation of Roderick due to his illness and depression. Roderick can be described as malnourished, hypersensitive, crazy, and sad due to his sister’s illness.