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The House Of Usher's Depression

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The Narrator arrives at the “melancholy” House of Usher, and immediately feels a sense of sorrow. He describes the house as having, “Bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges-- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to after-dream of the reveller upon opium”(Poe 1).What is meant by this quote is that the depression felt upon first glance at the house is one that can only be compared to the depression felt after coming down from a euphoric drug-like high. Regarding the physical landscape of the
The literature that Edgar Allan Poe has produced has been some of the most interesting literature in American history. …show more content…

His friend can barely manage to lift himself out of his bed under his own power; all of his senses are heightened. He can barely eat, and is very sensitive to light. Roderick is experiencing constant mood swings. At times he is energetic and seemingly happy. At other times, he is deathly depressed. Roderick says to the narrator, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most, trivial incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect -- in terror. I feel that period will sooner rather than later or soon arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR”. (Poe 5) Roderick feels as if he has made a mistake by staying in the house for so long. Roderick proclaims that the house has cast a curse on the entire Usher blood line. Roderick’s current mental state could also be attributed to his connection to the house to the House. Roderick explains how he feels like he is connected to the house in a certain superstitious way. It is as if he is trapped in the house, and he can’t escape. Roderick needs the house evidently, as much as the house needs him. They are both slowly

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In “The Fall of the House of Usher” Rodrick, although rational at the start, by slow degrees becomes insane about his house, and about his dead wife/ sister. By the end of the tale he is very deranged, and mentally disconnected. The tale thus represents the fall of reason, the inability of the rational mind to make sense of a chaotic universe. At the beginning one can tell that Roderick has unusual mental properties.

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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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