y connects him” (266). If we can believe that Roderick and the narrator are one, sharing madness, and the House of Usher evolved from the Usher family as one, then the narrator and the house are one. In the image of the house as skull or death’s-head and the merging of the narrator’s face with the face of the house which is also Usher’s face in the pool, we see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of the narrative structure of the tale to its visual focal point. . .it is clear that we do not know that anything the narrator has told us is ‘real,’ the whole tale and its structures may be the fabrication of the completely deranged mind of the narrator. Nothing at all may have happened in a conventional sense in the outside world—only in the inner world of the narrator’s mind. (Thompson 110) Even if we believe this tale is all a figment of the narrator’s mind, yet what of the relationship between Madeline and the narrator and Roderick to Madeline which is important to the storyline?Roderick and Madeline are identical twins and the “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (Poe 1165). This passage suggests that when one was ill the other one shared her pain and suffering. They have grown up in the same house and, for reasons not fully explained, remained in the house for their entire lives. His sister Madeline does not relieve his isolation; paradoxically, she intensifies it, for they are twins whose ‘striking similitude’ and ‘sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature’ eliminate that margin of difference which is necessary to social relationship between persons. They are not two persons, but one consciousness in two bodies, each mirroring the other, intensifying the introversion of the family character. (Abel 180) Shortly after the narrator arrives at Roderick’s chambers, he listens to Ro...
