“The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and “ House Taken Over “ by julio Cortazar, both Gothic Literatures explaining the lives of those who are too afraid to live, when they believe in buying themselves happiness. In both stories, the setting is based off two extremely large homes that are being taken care of by siblings, both male and female. They end up excluding themselves from each other's lives and begin to follow a routine based of the house. Both keeping you guessing at the end. Did they disappear? Did they die? The stories are very similar in writing style but the settings change as the story goes on. In Poe’s story “ The fall of the House of Usher” the brother Roderick Usher is not well, he is suffering of a mental disorder Roderick is tormented by his own fear and he kills his sister Madeline “ There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of emaciated frame” (Poe 30). The house ends up collapsing and they both pass away. In Cortazar’s story “ House Taken Over” the two siblings fall into a routine get up early, cleaning the house, going to the market, and then relaxing. They do this everyday and grow further and further apart the house begins to be “taken over” or so they believe and eventually the two disappear and die. “It wouldn't do to have some poor devil decide to go in and rob the house, at that hour and with the house taken over”( Cortazar’s 42).The two gothic novel are similar, they are both based of siblings and enormous houses, also the stories both end …show more content…
In “Fall Of House Of Usher” the brother is revealed as mentally ill and kills the sister. “ Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!” ( Poe 30). However, in “ House Taken Over” the brother ends up saving the sister and they disappear. “ Before we left, I felt terrible; I locked the front door up tight and tossed the key down the sewer” ( Cortazar
The Fall Of The House Of Usher Comparison Between Book vs. Movie How would you act if you had a family like the Usher’s? The short story by Edgar Allen Poe was published in 1839. Throughout the story lots of madness, incest, grotesque, and sickness was involved. The most grotesque thing in the story was one of the main characters, Roderick Usher. Roderick Usher was a sick man that wanted to be the only Usher left in his family.
Both of these authors wrote science fiction for the most part. They both really liked to write with a very imaginative style. In this they both created story with a lot of personification and out of this world personalities. Both of their writing were very suspenseful in: “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “The Tell Tale Heart”. Both of these stories in some way end off pretty sad or scary in a way and have a very suspenseful spot or a large peak in a story.
In both these stories there is practial tone, normal charters, and interesting events. The lifestyle of the charaters in both stories go from calm to abnormal, they differ in scary elements. In addition, the stories including my personal expirence all forshadow the following events. The bizzare and scary are used in “House taken over” by Julio Cortazar to demostrate how the charaters go from tolerant and normal to hopeless, frustrated, and anxious. The narrator and his sister Irene were doing their tipical and daliy routines, like it states in paragraph 3, “Irene never bothered anyone, once the housework was finished, she spent the rest of the day on the sofa in her bed
Poe was separated from his two siblings, who were William and Rosalie, and went to live with The Allans. Poe’s stepfather, John Allan, sent Poe to the University of Virginia in 1826. However, he didn’t receive enough funds from Allan to cover all his bills. He had then returned home, but his neighbor and fiancé, Sarah Elmira Royster, had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and
not surprisingly they are at a creepy old home. The Fall of the House of Usher and A Rose for Emily are unsurprisingly not so different. They both have this very creepy feeling to them considering they both are involving a very old house/mansion. Both settings also include it being dark out.
The narrator describes the house of having “vacant eye-like windows-upon a few rank sedges-and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees-...” (Poe, line 9) and “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart-...” (Poe, line 12) the “sickening of the heart” and “vacant eye-like windows” are examples of figurative language that foreshadows the misinterpreted death of Usher’s twin sister Madaline as they placed her in the the cellar of the house for later examination by physicians to find what disease she had come down
Writing to compare In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over,” the setting were similar because they both took place in a creepy house . However, in Poe’s story, the setting is in a creepy, almost broken down house. By contrast, Cortazar’s setting takes place in a big house that was very clean.
Imagery in Decay Topic: How Poe uses Imagery to further the plot in The Fall of the House of Usher Tentative thesis: Through the use of imagery Edgar Allan Poe shows a decrepit, dying family; by portraying the decay of both the house and those who reside in it Poe sets up the final fate of the two main characters in his short story. Topic sentence 1: Throughout the short story Poe uses the landscape and the very trees to give the house a supernatural life and induce horror in the reader.
Another theme is the power of the dead over the living. Even when the cat dies he still haunts the narrator after life. This help the madness drive within the characters mind. A barrier is broken between life and death in “The fall of house Usher” the sister rises back in bloodied clothes and “The Fall of the House of Usher” the dead actually comes back to life. “It was …the figure of lady Madeline of House Usher” (Poe 515).
“ The Fall of the House of Usher “ by Edgar Allan Poe is a short story about a man named Roderick Usher who initiates some events such as evoking his friend The Narrator as a protagonist to the dreadful mansion. The images such as the house and gothic ambience are used to reinforce the idea of giving the mystery to the reader. Edgar Allan Poe uses gothic elements to show how they affect the atmosphere and the characters. In the beginning , the gothic atmosphere of the house is indicated with terrifying images such as “ dull, dark and soundless ” that the feeling of horror vaccinated into reader by the thoughts of the narrator.
The different descriptions of the house and the nature around the house as well as the characters suggests this story is more of a gloomy sad
In his short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allen Poe uses foreshadowing to show how Roderick is sad to let go of Madeline. A quote showing this is: The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of her youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house (Poe 403).
Roderick and Madeline Usher have been riddled with many illnesses as a result of the many generations hailing from a “direct line of descent” (Poe 196). The twins are the last members of their family and are on the edge of extinction. It can be possible that the Usher’s had turned their backs on God and “betrayed the Holy Ghost in themselves” (The Fall of the House of Usher 167). As the last of the Usher House, Madeline and Roderick symbolize the end of “an Enlightenment tradition still standing but about to collapse” (The Fall of the House of Usher 167).
that the stem of the Usher race . . . had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. (Poe 2) Despite the incestual means of their conception occurring in the past, resulting genetic defects oppress the Usher siblings Madeline and Roderick—both physically and mentally—well into the future. Although the narrator provides no physical description of Madeline Usher prior to her entombment, of her brother Roderick he reports deformed features in line with those of products of
In the “Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher prematurely buries his sister, Madeline Usher, because he thinks she has died from an unknown illness. Poe describes the burial as, “We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made out the way with the toll…” (Poe 425). When Roderick bolted the iron lid upon his sister’s coffin, all trust that had previously been built between the two had been broken. In Poe’s life, after the burial of his wife and mother, he felt like he could never trust anyone as well.