Compare And Contrast The Raven And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

The story The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe begins with the Narrator describing his view of the House of Usher. The descriptions are very vivid when describing the spooky mansion. When he walks up he says “the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (Poe 749). The Narrator calls the windows of the house “vacant eye like windows” and the walls bleak. While describing and admiring how spooky the house looks, he speaks of his friend Roderick Usher who he has known since they were children. Roderick and his Sister, Madeline, are the last of the Usher family. The Narrator tells how the Usher family is famous for their commitment to music, literature and paintings. He stated that Roderick

His stories The Tell Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher all contain themes of macabre. In the Fall of the House of Usher, he starts off with a description of Usher’s gloomy mansion. Many people and critics have said and talked about how dark and gothic Poe’s writings are. “In practically all of Poe’s stories, there is a prevailing ambiance of final annihilation and decay, fragmentation and total destruction” (Philippov 223). Darlene Unrue has also stated that Poe’s settings are compiled with darkness, abyss, storms and so on. These setting characteristics have placed him into category of Gothicism ( Unrue 113). Poe uses words like Gloom, depression, and decaying to describe the setting of the short story The Fall of the House of Usher. These words and many others set the scene of the story and help to create better imagery for the reader. The dark and depressing macabre is seen throughout the plot of Usher and is an extremely vital piece of the story. Poe first brings in this dark depressing dominer at the very beginning when the Narrator is on his was to the house of Usher. He uses the words “dull, dark, and soundless”(Poe 749) to depict the path in which the Narrator is on. When the Narrator reaches the house he calls it “the melancholy House of Usher” (Poe 749). From the very first sentence to the last, Poe makes use of very descriptive words to help construct the theme of darkness and depression. The theme gets more intense when the Narrator states that he feels “a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit” (Poe 749). The Narrator begins to talk about the feeling he gets from the house. He again describes the landscape and house itself and then tells the reader of the atmosphere surrounding the house. “I had worked upon my imagination as really to believe that around the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate