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Insanity In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

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“The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest gothic tales. It captures exactly what it means to be a gothic short story; it has a gloomy musky surrounding, seems to always be night time, there's a mansion/castle that is falling apart, and two sick dying people that are struggling to live in it, and an unnamed narrator. The characters on the story are on the brink of insanity, or a mental breakdown. Poe’s constant obsession of death, and the insane measures humans will go through to avoid it are not scarce in this short story. When the story first begins, we learn that our narrator is visiting his old friend Roderick Usher. Roderick is introduced here, “ Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions …show more content…

If two people are kept to themselves for too long in a dark depressing place their minds might begin to wonder from sanity to insanity. Poe takes his characters the next step of insanity. He makes them one. Meaning they can't live without the other. If one is dead, the other will soon die too. When Usher puts his sister, who he thinks is dead in the cell and leaves her there, he seems to be afraid that his sister will come from the dead and scare him literally to death. Usher starts rocking back and forth in fear, so the narrator reads him a story about a knight fighting a dragon and this crazy stuff happens. “ the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound. No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than -- as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver -- I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony

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The story begins with the narrator admitting that he is a "very dreadfully nervous" type. This type is found throughout all of Poe 's fiction, particularly in the over-wrought, hyper-sensitive Roderick Usher in "The Fall of the House of Usher. " As with Usher, the narrator here believes that his nervousness has "sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them." Thus, he begins by stating that he is not mad, yet he will continue his story and will reveal not only that he is mad, but that he is terribly mad. His sensitivities allow him to hear and sense things in heaven, hell, and on earth that other people are not even aware of.

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Words like “dull” and “oppressive” along with phrases like “soundless day in the autumn of year,...” (Poe, line 1) help prevail the darkness lingering outside the house of Usher as if all the evils of the world would be spent on one final blow on the Usher family. As the story progresses however, both Usher and the narrator end up going crazy as the gloomy weather and the reawakening of Usher’s twin sister both contribute to the evils destroying the Usher family.

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In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the author Edgar Allen Poe uses the euphemism “the family lay in direct line of descent” (Poe 1) to show the meaning of incest has on the entire story that which causes guilt, desperation, and homicide. The history of incest in the Usher family and the incest Roderick and Madeline are guilty of causes Roderick to try to dispose of his guilt. He expresses to the narrator that he wishes to destroy this malady he describes as a “constitutional and family evil, and one of which he despaired to find a remedy” (Poe 3). Though the reader could assume that Roderick just talks about the physical illness he possesses that is described. Roderick tries to bury his own personal guilt – his sister, “a tenderly beloved

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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).

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