Essay On Response To Fear In The House Of Usher

The Evocation of Terror in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

“Limits, like fear, is often an illusion”(Michael Jordan). As explained in this quote, your imagination is really what drives you to fear. Based on the texts, “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortázar, fear is a key concept that often gets mixed with your imagination and replaces reality. Through these stories, your mind is shown to control many things you do or possibly see which forces yourself to feel like you’re out of reality.

The Fall Of the House Of Usher is a short story written by Edgar Allen Poe in 1839. The short story is complexly written, with challenging themes such as identity and fear. Poe utilises many elements of the Gothic Tradition such as setting and supernatural elements to create a more mysterious story, and uses language to his advantage, employing adjective filled descriptions of literal elements that also serve as metaphors for other parts of the story.

A Sense of Tension in The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

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.

Over the past two weeks, I have read two different stories about fear. Fear is an automatic response to physical and emotional danger we sense. People handle fear in many different ways but almost all of us let our imagination overcome reason.

Does any human know everything about his or herself that they want to know? The answer for most people is most definitely no; human thoughts are some of the most difficult problems to solve in everyone’s life, containing countless self penetrating questions. Throughout life, humans are riddles with these questions about themselves and their minds. These questions are generally difficult to answer, and people struggle with quite a few of them for a large portion of their life. After all, this is part of the human condition; asking questions. It is arguably what drives every human. This want for a greater understanding of the human mind that plagues all people to this day is pondered in a large number of romantic works. The authors of these stories

What is a horror? What does it mean to be terrified? The definition of a horror fiction is "fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the reader." Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called "horror" (Wikipedia) . "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a great example of a story on the basic level of a gothic horror, in which the element of fear is evoked in its highest form. There are many different elements, such as setting, feelings, themes, and characters, that play an essential role in suggesting this.

All interactions made between Beverly and her father you could see that Beverly had been through some kind of distressful trauma. You could sense her fear whenever her father would be near. This added an interesting factor to the film. It became a mystery to the audience what exactly the conflict between Beverly and her father was. Pennywise attacks all of the children based on their greatest fear.

First of all Poe uses the decaying setting to give a sense of dread. The narrator describes the atmosphere as similar “to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium”. It is dreary unearthly. The narrator also says that it is a dreary autumn day. Poe chose to set the story in autumn because it is a season commonly corresponding with death and fear. The actual house is decaying and covered in fungi with a large fissure going down the front of it.. This represents Usher’s state of mind during the visit. Moreover the shape of the house is said to be skull-like which could symbolize the presence of death throughout the story. The interior of the house is no different form its exterior. Once the narrator is led inside the house he finds

Edgar Allen Poe was an American author who wrote many short stories and poetry that has glorified him as a master of horror, suspense, psychological thriller, and romanticism. One of his works that embodies such pillars of Romanticism is the Fall of the House of Usher. In this story, Poe embraces pathetic fallacy from the very beginning. He talks about how gloomy and mysterious the house is - which is also a house from his childhood. He sets the stage with the following quote:

1. In Poe’s “The Fall of The House of Usher”, he uses disconsolate spellbinding phrases and portrayals to express the secret of the Usher manor. The Storyteller reunifies with his old acquaintance (Roderick), who is suffering from some bizarre psychological condition. He has a sister named Madeline nearing to her death. 2.

Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly one of American Literature's legendary and prolific writers, and it is normal to say that his works touched on many aspects of the human psyche and personality. While he was no psychologist, he wrote about things that could evoke the reasons behind every person's character, whether flawed or not. Some would say his works are of the horror genre, succeeding in frightening his audience into trying to finish reading the book in one sitting, but making them think beyond the story and analyze it through imagery. The "Fall of the House of Usher" is one such tale that uses such frightening imagery that one can only sigh in relief that it is just a work of fiction. However, based on the biography of Poe, events

The Fall of the House of Usher is a story “of sickness, madness, incest, and the danger of unrestrained creativity. This is among Poe's most popular and critically-examined horror stories” (Gordon). For example if you were to close your eyes while someone was reading the story you would see the house “decaying” in your imagination (Poe). From the start of the story the narrator’s strange “insufferable gloom” is introduced. He notes the darkness of his surrounding (Gordon). The stories are very deeply described and felt.

When the unnamed narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” first arrives at the Usher household, he refers to the building as being “melancholy” before adding that upon seeing the structure “a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (49). Through the narrator referring to the building as being “melancholy,” rather than simply saying that he feels “melancholy” looking at it, the house is personified by being ascribed human emotions. Whereas if he had said that he felt “melancholy” from looking at it, his explaining that the house makes him feel a “sense of insufferable gloom” would merely be an elaboration upon his own feelings upon seeing the house (49). However, because the “melancholy” is being attributed to the house itself and not to the narrator, what is being communicated is that because the house itself is “melancholy,” the narrator feels gloomy through a sense of empathy (49). The