The Fall of the House of Usher
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In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrative achieves powerful impact because Poe uses a narrative strategy that reveals plot information only when all devices of suspense have been exhausted, by unfolding in parallel the real-time experience of the narrator and the reader's experience of the story. Whatever else The Fall of the House of Usher is, it is also very much an exercise in literary technique, with the author putting the reader inside the recollections of the narrator, such that the narrator's memory and the reader's experience of what happened to him become one and the same. The reader seems meant to arrive at the immediacy of experience that the narrator underwent but that continues to affect him sharply and that is meant to have a sharp impact on the reader. The whole effect is to amplify the impact of the horrific climax that closes the story.That The Fall of the House of Usher is a tale of horror and suspense is established in the opening paragraph of the text, when the narrator--aided by the pathetic fallacy of the stormy day--recalls the "sense of insufferable gloom" that he experienced when first viewing the bleak landscape of the "melancholy House of Usher" (Poe 4). The scene thus set, the narrator proceeds to tell a story of observations that convince him--and his reader--that something both peculiar and scary is bound to happen. The point is that the sense of impending doom pervades the whole of the text, even though the narrator's ability to tell th
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not infrequently sharing something of the content of what he reads.
If the narrator is bookish, melancholy, and redolent of the Romantic hero, Roderick Usher has raised such attributes to a high art. They share an interest in books and were boyhood pals, but Usher's library is replete with dour books on theology, mythology, and death, including an account of the Inquisition--all of which has the effect of suggesting unhealthy preoccupations. The narrator cites the "character of phantasm" that had apparently dominated his friend's personal and family experience (Poe 9). Usher, meanwhile, turns out to be neurasthenic, hypochondriac, cadaverous, supersensitized, and possessed of peculiar ideas about everything from the neural properties of food to the ability of music to drive him mad. The ballad on which he accompanies himself on the guitar bespeaks the glory of a former kingdom beset by "evil things, in robes of sorrow, [which] Assailed the monarch's high estate" (Poe 9). The preoccupation with ruin, then, continues the project of setting the stage for what will turn out to be unremitting horror.
The foreshadowing of horror, of course, does not prevent the narrator from explaining his efforts to put a rational construction on hi
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Some common words found in the essay are:
House Usher, Roderick Usher, Usher Poe, Roderick Madeleine, house usher, Fall House, fall house usher, fall house, City Calif, narrator bookish, poe 9, dark stormy, experience narrator, tell story, reader's experience,
Approximate Word count = 1207
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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