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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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