m brewing outside the house. The narrator sees that this upsets him greatly and attempts to calm Roderick down as he is nearly hysterical. He reads Roderick a story out of the first book he picks up. It contains a story about a struggle between a knight and a dragon. As the narrator reads the story it mirrors some great struggle somewhere else in the house. The noises in the house are similar to the ones occuring in the house. It is soon discovered that the struggle is Madeline escaping from her tomb. Her superhuman desire to live leads her to force her way out of the vault and stagger to the upper chambers. In her death-throes, she lands on her brother, causing him to die of fright. The narrator escapes only to see the entire house collapse behind him as its lone inhabitants die. (Bloom 19)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 also giving the house a supernatural quality. The whole story centers around Poe's portrait of an insane man. He goes to great lengths to describe every detail of Roderick Usher's mental illness. Poe's description of Usher's face is very similar to his own features. This knowledge turns "The Fall of the House of Usher": a tale of the introverted, artistic soul tormented and unable to function in the ordinary world, into a brief glance into Poe's own struggles as a writer. This paper is the property of NetEssays.Net Copyright 1999-2002Unity in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”There is a remarkable unity of structure in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Every element in the tale is inextricably linked with the central image of the house itself and is thus linked, and ultimately identified with, every other element: including the Usher family, Roderick, Madeline a...
