ger the narrator associates with Roderick, the more he realizes “the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom” (Poe 1161). After Madeline’s death and interment, Roderick begins to change. The narrator observes:“At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into a mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions. (Poe 1166).In the concluding pages of the tale, a storm arrives. The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading from the “Mad Trist.” The narrator becomes so involved with the reading that he starts to associate the sounds in the story with the sounds emanating from under his bedroom—“I did actually hear. . .a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer” (Poe 1168).In a sense, the narrator has become Roderick . In this strange and gloomy atmosphere, with madness and death surrounding him, the narrator’s mind, if not already mad, is very near it. Richard Wilbur goes so far as to suggest, “The extreme decay of the House of Usher—a decay so extreme as to approach the atmospheric—is quite simply a sign that the narrator, in reaching that state of mind which he calls Roderick Usher, has very nearly dreamt himself free of his physical body, and of the material world with which that bod...
