Similarities Between The Tell-Tale Heart And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe is well known for this Gothic style of writing and the darker aspects of human nature. Edgar Allan Poe uses the same themes repeatedly in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “The Masque of the Red Death”. While the themes are developed differently in each short story, they all come together to form the three main ideas: death, madness, and isolation.
One of the most common themes in all three short stories is madness. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” when the narrator is reading to Roderick Usher, he was hearing voices that were in the story, he goes over to Roderick Usher and Roderick says he has been hearing his sister Madeline ever since they buried her. “I now tell you that I heard her first

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator observes an old man with an evil eye and becomes obsessed with it causing him to murder him. When the police came into his house to question him, he begins to lose his mind and thinks that they know what he has done and begins mocking him for it. “’Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!’” (Poe 8). His insanity took over and he admitted to killing the old man. Finally, in “The Masque of the Red Death” madness is conveyed by Prince Prospero when he decided to throw a masquerade, while the Red Death was spreading and killing the townspeople. He isolated himself from reality

In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick Usher was isolated in rotting mansion. He was isolated physically because after the death of his sister he was the only one alive in his family. He was suffering from “morbid acuteness of the senses” because of the loss of his sister. The narrator is also affected by the isolation because when he walked in the house, he grew sick. When the narrator first saw the house, he described it as “insufferably gloom” and “an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation . . .” (Poe 3). In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator creates isolation through his insanity that he feels about the old man’s eye. This caused him to become overly proud of himself for murdering the man. “I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search—search well.” (Poe 7). He was proud of himself because he knew they would never find the body parts that his hid under the flooring. His pride takes over and it causes him to alienate himself from others. In “The Masque of the Red Death,” Prince Prospero tries to isolate himself from the reality of the plague by locking himself in his castle along with his guests for a masquerade. “. . . he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.” (Poe 3). His reality slowly