Compare And Contrast The Fall Of The House Of Usher And The Tell Tale Heart

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“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.
Poe sets the setting as dark and gloomy, most likely to give the reader the death is in the air vibe in the beginning of “The Fall of the House of Usher”. “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it - I paused to think - what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher?” The narrator, who is nameless throughout the whole story, receives a letter from an old childhood friend. According to the letter Roderick, the narrator’s childhood friend, has invited the narrator …show more content…

The narrator, who is nameless, begins the story by telling us that he is not nervous but rather insane. He explains that he has a disease that sharpens his senses that allows him to hear and see better than a normal person. The narrator begins to tell a story about how he loved an old man that has never did any harm to him. However he couldn’t stand the sight of the old man. Literally sight is the right word to use because the narrator hated the man’s blue

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