Edgar Allen Poe's Apocalyptic Sublime

Edgar Allen Poe has an amazing mastery over the English language. His word choices are often a strange combination which not only causes the reader to slow down, but to reread the passage and ponder its meaning. Many see Poe as a master of the Apocalyptic Sublime. A writer who can make the reader feel the horror and terror of the characters as the story progress. Using the write words Poe can let the reader feel the horror and terror felt by his characters and see the decimation before them. This often increases the speed of the reader and carries them till the conflict and excitement explodes. To the point where his characters confess the secrets of their souls and the misdeeds they have committed. In the short story “The Fall of the

The only life found outside is the fungus growing across the House, feeding on the decay and rot of the plants and structure. This family that is rich and powerful has allowed their home, the symbol of their stability and dominance to fall into such disarray. The masonry hasn’t started yet to fall, but the cracks are beginning to show. “In disclosing the abyss in metaphor and loosing forms of metaphorical substitution and screening, Poe’s phantasmagoria move towards a phantasmagoreality refusing the stability and separation of hallucination and reality, mind and fiction” (Botting, 2010, p. 14). The sight of the House in such misery causes the narrator to turn and look at the tarn next to the House, so the picture can be more serene, but to his horror the inverted image is even more ghastly. Instead of giving some relief to the growing panic the image makes the narrator question which image is his reality. Finally, the narrator notes that the whole atmosphere reeks of decay and rot while the silent tarn holds no life foreshadowing the end of the line of Usher and the disease of the

Roderick and Madeline come from a long family line, however, their family tree does not have many branches or off shoots. To keep the family line “pure” they quite often married within instead of seeking brides or husbands from other families. This behavior has been encouraged for some time in the House of Usher, “the stems of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch” (p. 150). Roderick even comments that his disease is a “constitutional and a family evil” and one that he cannot escape except “when I must abandon life and reason together” in death (p. 153). Roderick tells the narrator that he is dying because of a family disease and he shares this disease with his sister. “In keeping with .. Gothic fiction, the House of Usher is apparently under the sway of a mysterious curse manifested in both its genealogical sterility and the physical decay of its ancestral residence” (Cook, 2012, p. 12). Perhaps it is a genetic defect or perhaps a now known disease which can cause sterility, madness and death such as syphilis. Whatever the evil’s name, Roderick knows he and Madeline are doomed and this shows through his