The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essays (2796 words) -

The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe wrote, "The Fall of the House of Usher", using characterization, and imagery to depict fear, terror, and darkness on the human mind. Roderick and his twin sister, Madeline, are the last of the all time-honored House of Usher (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 462). They are both suffering from rather strange illnesses, which may be attributed to the intermarriage of the family. Roderick suffers from "a morbid acuteness of the senses"( Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 464), while Madeline's illness is characterized by " a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent all though transient affections of a partly cataleptical character"(Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 465) which caused her to lose consciousness and feeling. The body would then assume a deathlike rigidity. Roderick believes the house is controlling his condition. He calls on the narrator, a boyhood friend, in a last ditch effort to cheer his life up by giving him someone to communicate with. The narrator arrives to a house of gloom and darkness with decaying furniture. He immediately is afraid for his life and wonders how his friend can live in a house of such darkness. Several days pass and it is filled with art discussions, guitar playing, and literature reading, all trying to keep Roderick's mind busy (Jacobs and Roberts, pg. 465). The narrator and Roderick prematurely unconfined Madeline in a vault in hopes to alleviate his metal condition. She is either dead, in a coma, or a vampire; Poe allows the reader to make his own assumption. She is possibly a vampire because they bolt down the coffin hoping she will not escape. As some days pass his mental condition worsens possibly related to the fear and terror of the noises coming from the vault. The narrator is unaware if the noises are coming from the coffin, but he believes they are all throughout the house. As they are reading literature in the study, there is a loud knock at the door, it is Madeline at the door, embodied in blood from scratching her way out of the coffin. The narrator realizes they buried her alive and looks to Roderick for answers. Roderick, terrified, is unable to look at Madeline, realizing that death has come for him. Madeline proceeds to walk towards Roderick and falls on him, the reader assumes that she begins to eat him but the narrator flees in fear of death. "A gust of wind blew the doors, and there did stand the enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline...There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon...her brother, and in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse..." "Suddenly the wrath of the storm increased, and the mansion began to shake and crumble. The friend frantically fled from the chamber and from out of that mansion. Only once did he turn to gla nce back, when his attention was arrested by a wild light..."The radiance was that of the full setting...blood red moon, which now show vividly through that once barely discernible fissure..." " There was a loud explosion, and the walls of the mansion came crashing down. Deep and dank tarn.. closed sullenly and silently of over the fragments of the House of Usher. Poe introduces three characters: Lady Madeline, Roderick Usher, and the narrator, whose name is never give. Lady Madeline, twin sister of Roderick Usher, does not speak one word throughout the story. In fact, she is absent from most of the story, and she and the narrator do not stay together in the same room. At the narrator's arrival, she takes to her bed and galls into a catatonic state. He helps bury her and put her away in a vault, but when she reappears, he flees. Poe seems to present her as a ghostlike figure. Before she was buried, she roamed around the house quietly not noticing anything. According to the narrator, Lady Madeline "passed slowly through a