The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis

📌Category: Edgar Allan Poe, Literature, Writers
📌Words: 498
📌Pages: 2
📌Published: 04 February 2022

“The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most well-known short stories. The story is a gothic work and has examples of gothic literature littered throughout. Poe’s work is about a brother and sister who are the only ones left in a family bloodline that reproduce with each other. The narrator was once a friend of Roderick Usher and is coming to his creepy house to meet with him. Roderick’s sister Madeline dies, or so we think and he puts her in a tomb below the house. As it turns out, she is not actually dead and instead is scratching at the door to get out. 

When Roderick opens the door to the tomb, Madeline comes out with blood on her and dies in his arms as he then dies too. Poe’s use of gothic elements aims to make the story sound credible, even though the reader can tell that there is something supernatural going on. The story is set in a haunted mansion with an eerie and frightening atmosphere, has mysterious characters, and deals with death and decay. 

The story is set in a haunted mansion that has an unpleasant look to it and has a gruesome atmosphere. The Usher family is isolated from all others because they only reproduce with other family members, which many look down upon and believe is unholy. 

The story starts out, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” (Poe, 629), which is already getting a creepy feeling. The weather was gloomy on this day and this is foreshadowing to the reader that something is wrong because bad weather signifies something will happen. The walls are described as bleak, and the windows are vacant and eye-like. The narrator feels scared and the reader is getting a sense of horror for what will happen when he actually meets Roderick. When he enters the room where Roderick is, he noticed an atmosphere of sorrow as Roderick looked pale and skinny. After they put Madeline in the tomb after she is presumed dead, the narrator starts to hear a noise coming from the tomb. A few days later, Roderick said that he heard the noise and that he has heard it since they put her in there, and that she was indeed alive. This is a very scary scenario because if Roderick had heard her for days now, did he know that she was still alive when she was put in the tomb? If not, why did he not get her out when he first heard the sounds? This brings the reader to consider the fact he knew she was alive and kept her in the tomb because he did not want to keep the family line going with her. 

At the very end of the story, the weather comes up again, this time a lightning strike hit a crack in the house and splits it right in two. Poe uses the weather to make it seem believable instead of supernatural that these things could have happened, including the house splitting in two after the last of the Usher’s just died.

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