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 the story suggests that he will have survived the ordeal. The overall image is that of the dashing Romantic/Gothic hero who is decked out in a cutaway and cloak and (of course) riding his horse in (more exactly through, by the time the story is complete) the storm. But oh, what a storm it shall have been.
[W]hen I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I b...