How Is The Figurative Language Used In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Cliff Lerner mentioned, “Fear of the unknown is a destructive force. It causes people to make suboptimal choices by avoiding that fear.” Lerner was trying to point out that people mostly make their irrational decisions based off of what they are scared of and not what they think they should do. Fear compels individuals to see possibilities that aren’t natural because they are afraid of what they fear will be there to hurt them, so humans avoid it. Both the stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, written by Edgar Allen Poe and, “The Devil and Tom Walker”, written by Washington Irving use the figurative language mood and symbolism, although Irvings’ story uses satire, while Poe’s story uses personification and foreshadowing to present these

At the start of the description of the creepy house in paragraph one, the narrator has arrived and is taking in the sight of the house. He uses descriptive language and compares the house because it has a, “utter depression of soul”(1). This is the use of personification because only a person can be depressed, not the soul. The soul makes up the person that would be depressed. Also it is personification because the house can not be depressed like a human can so it gives us an example of how sad and miserable the house looks, which is why the narrator is frightened. While the narrator outlines the view of the house, he describes the windows as, “vacant eyelike windows”(1) because the windows are empty and it seems like no one is living in the house. The windows do not really look like human eyes that are empty. Poe is trying to use

In paragraph five of Poe’s story, as the narrator takes in the sight of the house, he realizes that their was a large crack from the top of the front roof, all the way down “in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters.”(Poe,5) The narrator has arrived at the house and can not believe how daunting the house looks and it makes him wonder how bad-off his friend actually might be. This is a use of symbolism because later on in the story we are shown how Roderick Usher acts and how poor his health actually is. The owner of the house, Roderick, has a very strong illness of schizophrenia which makes him lose his mind; the cracks in the house resemble the “cracks” in Usher’s mind. In paragraph forty-seven of “The Fall of the House of Usher”, at the time that Roderick’s illness was hightened, he was going crazy and told the narrator that he was hearing his dead sister that they put in the vault. He kept repeating that she was alive and in that instance she burst through the door with, “blood upon [Madeline’s] white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.”(Poe,47). A woman in distress is one of the literary elements of gothic literature and after they closed her in a vault alive, she fought her way out