rged with abnormal weakness on account of being abnormally strong. (Buranelli 23) Poe was a genius in the literary field and that gave him the grounds to say so. As he explains in this passage, his far superior ability to write pieces of literature caused a lot of friction between the modern day critics and writers and himself. This passage was an autobiographical account of his writing style and its effect on the society of the time. Along with writing about his style of writing, Poe also included autobiographical elements in his stories. These stories explained to the reader how Poe lived his life. The somber figure of Edgar Allan Poe stalks forever through the pages of his stories and poems. He is declared to have only one endlessly repeated male characterhimself. He is pictured as appearing and reappearing under the guises of his melancholic, neurasthenic, hallucinated, mad and half-mad protagonists: Roderick Usher, Egaeus, William Wilson, Cornelius Wyatt, Montresor, Hop-Frog, Metzengerstein. (Buranelli 19-20) Among these protagonists, the one Poe seems to represent more is the half-mad, Roderick Usher. In the story The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe presents himself through the morbidly uncanny Roderick Usher. All in all, he is an unbalanced man trying to maintain an equilibrium in his life (Partridge N. pag). Usher was also a man who realizes his insanity but struggles to grasp his lost sanity. In this passage Poe writes about the narrators description of Roderick Usher, but in doing so describes himself to his readers: A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely molded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than weblike softness and tenuitythese features, with an in...
