Similarities Between The Fall Of The House Of Usher And House Taken Over

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Recommended: Critical Analysis on the Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Both Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” have similar settings because they both take place in large, scary houses. However, in Poe’s story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the house is much more eerie as with the description given of this house, it gives off a mood of incoming misfortune. By contrast, in Cortazar’s story, the larger parts of the house, like the dining room and the library, is blocked off away where the characters of this story mainly stays. This gives the house a mysterious vibe, because if anything happens in the blocked off part of the house, the event is not know specifically, opening it up for interpretation. In gothic literature, elements such as bleak settings, …show more content…

. For instance, in Poe’s story, Usher said that “We have put her living in the tomb!...I now tell you that i heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin”(Poe 29). This quote refer to the character Madeline, who was presumed dead and encoffined. She was not dead, but even more surprisingly, she manages to scrape herself out of the entombment that had an immense weight that “caused an unusually sharp, grating sound as it moved upon its hinges”(Poe 24). This detail is pretty bizarre, and it is related to the event mentioned above in Cortazar’s story in the sense that somehow, with such unlikely odds, it was reasonable for someone as weak and frail as her to break out of a tomb such as that one, unassisted, just to enact revenge on her brother. This event is also related to Cortazar’s story, but in a way that flipped the fiction/ non-fiction possibility scale backwards, switching the weight on the two sides. As in “House Taken Over,” it would make much more sense that people broke into the house searching for the brother and sister that are hiding so cleverly, rather than to assume that it was a fantastical event.Therefore, the two stories are related because they both include a presumably magical event, but those events are still open for interpretation, and that is work given only to the reader’s

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