Symbols In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Deep within every person there is a sense of fear that terrifies them for life. In Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Fall of the house of Usher”, the narrator enters the home of a lifelong friend, Usher, who has fallen to the fear he has held within him. Usher’s twin sister, Madeline, has Usher on edge thinking that she is dead. When they bury her, she comes back to life and takes him away to die with him. They are the last two of the family of Ushers. The house itself splits in two and gets sucked into the ground. His fear leads to the what was left of the Usher family to die and the family coming to the end of their time. Fear can lead to a person scaring themselves, which leads them to die by the craziness the fear causes, is a gigantic idea in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, by Edgar Allen Poe.

One of the largest symbols in the book is the house that the Usher’s live in. Poe writes, “...and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘house of Usher’” (Poe 494). Like the family itself, the house died with rest of the Usher family. Without the rest of Ushers to live there, it died in the fear of not having life live inside of it. Another symbol is Madeline Usher. She symbolizes the evil side of a person. When she comes back to the house, Poe writes, “...fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” Madeline came back and killed her brother; adding a creepiness to how he died. In a big way, Poe uses symbolism to add a tone to the story and cast more fearful