Edgar Allan Poe Exposed in The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay

While most of the primary characters in the American Gothic cannon are members of the aristocracy, their societally dominant position does not guarantee them satisfying lives. The focus of this analysis will be the portrayal of the individual as it relates to his or her economic status: does having wealth mean that upper class characters are more likely to lead fulfilling lives than middle/lower class characters? Through a close reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, readers can clearly see a pattern of social commentary in which the members of the aristocracy are—in general—the most restricted,

Edgar Allan Poe used fear to attract his readers into his gothic world. Poe realized that fear intrigues as well as frightens, and sew it as a perfect motif for many of his stories, particularly The Fall of the House of Usher. Poe emphasized the mysterious, desolate, and gloomy surroundings throughout the story to set up the fear that got the reader involved. Then he extended the fear to the characters in order to reveal the importance of facing and overcoming fear. Poe suggested in the story that the denial of fears can lead to madness and insanity. This has clearly shown through the weakening of Roderick Usher's mind and the resulting impact on the narrator of the story.

One night, as the narrator is lying in his room, he finds himself incapable of falling asleep. Edgar Allan Poe writes, pertaining to the narrator, “I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me.” As the narrator lay there, he found that he felt he should try to sleep no more. A moment later Roderick Usher

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

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

The story of “The Fall of the House of Usher by Edger Allan Poe shows that the narrator is having a nervous break down. The story is about the narrator going to the usher house do to the fact that his childhood friend Roderick wrote him to come help him and his sister who is mentally ill. Through the story Roderick shows how insane he is and his sister, the ushers ultimatally die and the house crumbles to the ground. The story had a disturbing and dark presents through out it just like the narrator’s mind. One might make the inference that the narrator is actually narrating what is happing in his mind and having a nervous break down. The narrator is projecting his symptoms on the imaginary Usher family.

Edgar Allan Poe was a sick man that went through a troubling life full of tragedies. For Poe to deal with this he drank and poured his feelings into his works. Honestly as horrible it is that he had to go through all of that we should be grateful because without his suffering these masterpieces wouldn’t have been fabricated. While intensifying his philosophy for short stories Edgar Allan Poe wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” reflecting the characteristics of Dark Romantic Movement.

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’s use of personification, the act of giving human characteristics to nonhuman things, assigns the house of Usher a powerful and evil presence. In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator describes the

Roderick Usher is a victim of circumstance. The House he has known his whole life seems to have turned against him. Poe

After evaluating the work of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, he utilizes with imagery to build up the feeling of terror. First of all, the passage is about an ill man, Roderick Usher, who invites his old friend of his to come meet him. In this passage both him and his sister, Madeline Usher, are the last remaining of the Usher race and is diagnosed with an unnatural illness. The narrator begins to feel terror with the supernatural things going on in the house of Usher and the illness of the Ushers. Although the narrator feels the sense of terror from the moment he entered the house, through the use of imagery, Poe is able to bring emotion to the reader. Throughout the passage, the author continues to build up the sense of terror by asserting the image and setting of both the passage and the atmosphere. For instance, he starts the passage by stating “a dull, dark, and a soundless day...clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (Poe 194). In relation to the previous quote, the quote illustrates the image of the atmosphere and the setting of the story. In particular, because Poe expresses the sense of terror by describing the atmosphere as dark, quiet, and gloomy, the reader can get an image of the surroundings and get the feeling of the darkness and horror. In addition, according to Poe, during the first glimpse of the house of Usher, the narrator describes it as gloomy and unpleasant. In particular, Poe states “the shades of the evening drew on… a sense of insufferable gloom” (Poe 194). Additionally, the description of the house adds on to the sense of terror that Poe established in the beginning of the story. Based on the past two quotes stated by the author, the reader can begin to picture a dark and dull day with a gloomy house adding on to the darkness. Lastly, in regards to Edgar Allan Poe, the house of Usher is

Throughout, The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe utilized his romantic philosophy on shallowest level to immerse the reader in a depressing environment, encapsulating his mind and plunging him into a strange story of ancestral tension

“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe is described as a gothic tale. A gothic tale or gothic novel is “a genre of fiction characterized by mystery and supernatural horror, often set in a dark castle or other medieval setting”¹. Like many of Poe’s short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a dark tale filled with madness, isolation, fear, and supernatural horrors.

The Fall of The House of Usher is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe during the 1800’s. The short story itself is written with very important themes that seem challenging, such as fear and identity. Poe effectively uses his strategy of the Gothic Tradition, such as the setting of the story by including the supernatural elements to create a story filled with mystery and uses a different form of writing to his advantage by using descriptive language of literary elements, such as metaphors.