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The role of imagination in literary creation
The fall of the house of usher realism
The fall of the house of usher realism
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Imagination, the ability to mentally form images or concepts without direct sensory input, is a defining human characteristic and is valued among many aspects of society, especially the fine arts. However, under certain circumstances, imagination can lead to abnormal thoughts and behaviors in individuals. Characters such as Roderick Usher from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The House of Usher” and the siblings from “House Taken Over”, a short story by Julio Cortázar, demonstrate that when people are subjected to excessive amounts of stress, their imaginations can lead to psychotic tendencies by blurring their perceptions of fantasy and reality. In the “House of Usher”, Roderick Usher is portrayed as the troubled proprietor of the House of Usher.
This paper will explore the connection of schizophrenia with Poe’s The Fall of The House of Usher (1839). This paper suggests that the characters of the twins Roderick Usher and Madeline Usher are not two characters, but in fact are one character
“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “House Taken Over,” are two short stories that
First of all, we have the symbolisme of Roderick Ushers mind and the House of Usher coinciding. Both can be seem as one and the same.
Have you been through times when you could not go to sleep because of the horror movies that you have watched that day?Why do we start to get scared after watching something that we know is fictional?Why we don't think logically? That's when Imagination takes over.An action of forming new ideas,images,or concepts of external objects that aren't present to the senses is known as imagination.Though it is not harmful as many psychologists believe. Imagination is important and good because it ignites passion,stimulates creativity and innovation According to most phycologists but when imagination takes over reasoning(thinking something in a logical way) it becomes frantic. To support my believe I used two short stories “House of Usher” and”House taken over”.The first story”Fall of House of Usher”which is a gothic story includes characteristics like death and decaying setting,haunted houses/castles,madness,ghost and vampires etc. The second story that will also support my believe is “House taken over” which is based on magical realism and have traits such as describing unordinary events as ordinary events, is based on everyday
When the story begins in “The House of Usher,” the narrator over exaggerates the description of the house in an attempt to explain his own disgust with the home. Reading Edgar Allan Poe’s stories seem to follow a pattern of dark feelings. His descriptions can give the reader an image in their head of a negative look and sets them up for a negative story. By writing about an eerie broken home such as “The House of Usher”, one could say the exaggerative descriptions are creating images that can depict the possible dreariness of a household. The dreariness may have consumed the residents of the household, which is mirrored in the state of the house. Poe has been said to have grown up in a broken home extending into a difficult childhood and deaths of his loved ones continuing to be a large portion of his life (Giammarco 28). By this mindset, a home can easily fall into a morbid trap of misery and unfortunate deaths. Poe’s drinking problem may also influence the way Poe may see home (Giammarco 22). An alcoholic may...
For a writer, stylistic devices are key to impacting a reader through one’s writing and conveying a theme. For example, Edgar Allan Poe demonstrates use of these stylistic techniques in his short stories “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The former story is about a party held by a wealthy prince hiding from a fatal disease, known as the Red Death. However, a personified Red Death kills all of the partygoers. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is about a man who visits his mentally ill childhood companion, Roderick Usher. At the climax of the story, Roderick’s twin sister, Madeline, murders him after he buries her alive. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories employ the stylistic decisions of symbolism, dream-like imagery, and tone to affect the reader by furthering understanding of the theme and setting and evoking emotion in readers.
Traditional Gothic writers based their works on several elements such as: horrendous incidents, tormented characters, supernatural occurrences, etc. However, one of the most important elements to these talented writers was setting. Setting may seem like a very straightforward literary term, but in reality, it has many layers which can convey many things to the reader. Two such Gothic writers that used setting to convey important ideas to the reader of their stories is: Joyce Oates, author of “Where is Here?” and Edgar Allan Poe, author of a horrendous story called “The Fall of The House of Usher”. Both writers use setting to: create a certain atmosphere, communicate the truths about their characters, and to foreshadow events.
Unlike most people, the narrator of the story seems to be perfectly at ease with the appearance, actions and thoughts of Roderick, which leads us as the readers to ask the begging question, “Was the un-named narrator just, if not more, irrational and insane as Roderick Usher himself”? Although we end the story with many questions, suspicions and uncertainty, this is the beauty of Poe’s writing, something many authors try to encompass in their writing still to this day. While analyzing and observing the appearance, thoughts and actions of Roderick Usher, we can ultimately thank and respect the mind of Edgar Alan Poe for giving us a high standard for literacy and short stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher”.
Thus, Roderick Usher does not insolate himself at the beginning, as he asks in a letter to his friend, the narrator of the story, if he could come to visit him. This is the ultimate attempt of Usher to get rid of the fear that overruns him, as the purpose of the narrator’s visit is to bring light into the dark House of Usher.
Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly one of American Literature's legendary and prolific writers, and it is normal to say that his works touched on many aspects of the human psyche and personality. While he was no psychologist, he wrote about things that could evoke the reasons behind every person's character, whether flawed or not. Some would say his works are of the horror genre, succeeding in frightening his audience into trying to finish reading the book in one sitting, but making them think beyond the story and analyze it through imagery. The "Fall of the House of Usher" is one such tale that uses such frightening imagery that one can only sigh in relief that it is just a work of fiction. However, based on the biography of Poe, events that surrounded his life while he was working on his tales were enough to show the emotions he undoubtedly was experiencing during that time.
From the beginning of “The Fall of the House of Usher” to the end, we watch Roderick Usher’s descent into madness and the loss of the narrator’s ability to rationalize; we see the narrator follow Usher into madness. By the end of the tale the narrator is hallucinating: he hears Madeline break out of her tomb and then sees her standing in his doorway. Roderick was driven insane by the loss of his sister, being trapped in his house, and being inbred; this insanity affects the narrator, causing him to see and hear things that aren’t there.
In this passage, Roderick Usher expresses his fears aloud, they come to pass. “As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell”, Usher’s fears materializing implies a causal relationship between the two events. Furthermore, it suggests a correlation of the speech and the supernatural , particularly in the Usher family. As evidenced by the panels “to which the speaker pointed” moving, the emphasis is on Usher’s implied control over them; this hints at the link between the House of Usher and their house. The doors seem to respond to him, indicating Usher controls the house, even if he suspects the house has control over him, creating a mystical, if somewhat terrifying, mood. When “[the antique panels] threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws”, the personified house
Roderick Usher is a victim of circumstance. The House he has known his whole life seems to have turned against him. Poe illustrates Roderick in a way that mirrors that of the undead: “cadaverousness of complexion”, “lips…thin and very pallid”, and “silken hair”. Not only is Roderick’s physical appearance declining, his mental stability is “incoherent” as well. His psychological health digresses as a result of the culmination of disturbing events in his life. According to an analysis by G. R. Thompson, the story features a conflict constructed by Poe “between reason and irrationality” (qtd. in Timmerman). At the beginning of the story, Roderick suffered from “acute bodily illness” and “nervous agitation” which seem to be mostly self-inflicted. These then morph into “restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor” as his sanity decreases even more. Roderick starts to lose his grip on reality and slips even further into the clutches of fear and confusion. This rapid decline in Roderick’s mental health is made evident to the reader through the narrators progressing fear of him and what will come of him in the imminent future. “The ...
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest of intelligence,” Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is famous in the writing world and has written many amazing stories throughout his gloomy life. At a young age his parents died and he struggled with the abuse of drugs and alcohol. A great amount of work he created involves a character that suffers with a psychological problem or mental illness. Two famous stories that categorize Poe’s psychological perspective would be “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Both of these stories contain many similarities and differences of Poe’s psychological viewpoint.
The Fall Of The House of Usher is a terrifying tale of the demise of the Usher family, whose inevitable doom is mirrored in the diseased and evil aura of the house and grounds. Poe uses elements of the gothic tale to create an atmosphere of terror. The decaying house is a metaphor for Roderick Usher’s mind, as well as his family line. The dreary landscape also reflects his personality. Poe also uses play on words to engage the reader to make predictions, or provide information. Poe has also set the story up to be intentionally ambiguous so that the reader is continually suspended between the real and the fantastic.