behavior and personalities of its inhabitants. For example, Upon meeting Roderick Usher, the narrator remarks, ..... the physique of the gray walls and the turrents, and of the dim tarninto which they all looked down, had, at length, brought upon the morale of his existence" (Perkins, 1515). The narrator is remarking on Usher's strange behavior in the house. Roderick Usher also had a firm belief in the sentience of inorganic matter and he sees the reason for this belief in the atmosphere. Moreover, he states that the atmosphere has been responsible for the strangeness of his family and his habits. The narrator later describes his own superstition when he remarks, "I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy flirniture of the room..." (Perkins, 1520). He also describes feelings of alarm which he has as causeless, perhaps indicating that the house may in fact be having some effect on him. I. M. Walker sums up this observation best when he writes that the narrators mental unbalance is obviously being disturbed by his environnment (52). Walker also states, "the narrator leaves the House of Usher with a sense of supernatural fatality accomplished with no natural explanation" (61).Throughout the story, Poe's imagery of the house and the inanimate objects inside serve to give a supernatural atmosphere to the story. By giving inanimate objects almost life-like characteristics, he is giving the house a supernatural quality. The supernatural element serves to make Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" interesting and suspensfill in his treatment of the house's effect on its occupants.Works CitedAbel, Darrel. "A Key to The House of Usher." Interpretations of American Literature. Ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. and Paul Brodtkorb, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959: pgs. 51-62.Magill, Frank N. Magill's Survev of American Literature. Vol.5: Olsen-Snyder:New York: Salem Press, ...
