The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

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In the story, “The Fall of The House of Usher”, there are many mysterious happenings that go on throughout the story between the characters Roderick Usher and the narrator. Throughout the story, Edgar Allan Poe uses themes such as madness and insanity to connect the house back to Roderick Usher. In the “Fall of The House of Usher”, the narrator goes through many different experiences when arriving to the house. The narrator’s experiences start out as almost unnoticeable in the beginning, turn into bigger ones right before his eyes, and end up becoming problems that cause deterioration of the mind and the house before the narrator even decides to do anything helpful for Roderick and his mental illness. In “The Fall of The House of Usher”, Edgar Allan Poe uses comparison between the physical House of Usher and the family of Usher to describe that looks can be deceiving and that little problems can lead to later downfall. In the beginning, The House of Usher looked a little dreary but nothing that the narrator felt to be concerned about. Poe writes, “Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher had been one of my boon comparisons in boyhood; but many years had erased since our last meeting”(Poe 1). This quote shows the reader that there was a sense of weirdness to the mansion, but the narrator overlooked the strangeness because Roderick Usher had been his friend since childhood. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of those stories that the reader knows more about the main character than the narrator does. The reader can already pick up on Roderick’s madness and insanity in the beginning, while the narrator picks up on it when it is too late... ... middle of paper ... ...ed if his friend thought about people more than just the general aspect of them. Waiting until problems spiral into greater ones causes major downfall, so the moral is too never pass by an opportunity to fix a problem in life before it is too late. Works Cited Hobby, Blake. "The Sublime in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" ." Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Prentice Hall Literature Georgia: The American Experience. Upper Sadlle River: Pearson, 2011. 292-310. Print. Sova, Dawn B. ""The Fall of the House of Usher"." Bloom's Literature. Facts On File, Inc. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Kathleen Wilson. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 51-66. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.

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