Comparing The Fall Of The House Of Usher And The House Taken Over

When comparing the stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” written by Edgar Allen Poe and “The House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar. The setting in both are in a creepy, big house with a gothic style to it, which makes it more creepy. Both of the authors were a dark and demented type. Both in their stories have a big, empty house with a few people in them, with either kids that are living alone or with grandparents. Also both stories have a sense of having something under their sleeve to hit us with.

For the stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The House Taken Over”, there is similarities in these stories. In the “The Fall of House Of Usher”, The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his friend, Roderick

Usher, having received a letter from him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illness and asking for his help. As he arrives, the narrator notes a thin crack extending from the roof, down the front of the building and into the adjacent lake. The way this is similar with “The House Taken Over”, is a brother and sister are introduced, both in their early-forties. Each has faced difficulties in their adult lives, the brother having lost his fiancée long ago, and the sister (Irene) having denied many suitors who sought her hand in marriage. Inheriting their parent's house and wealth, they live a quiet, usually mundane, domestic existence.
The narrator describes the estate and the siblings' routine in great detail, describing their chores and interests; Irene knits all day, unraveling her work the moment it does not please her, while the narrator collects French literature and buys Irene wool during his visits to the bookstores.

Usually, their home is silent, but when one day the narrator suddenly hears something inside another part of the house, the siblings escape to a smaller section, locked behind a solid oak door. In the intervening days, they become frightened and solemn; on the one hand noting that there is less housecleaning, but regretting that the interlopers have prevented them from retrieving many of their personal belongings. All the while, they can occasionally hear noises from the other

side.

Then the differences in the story are the ways the author’s described the stories, in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Edgar Allen Poe described the story violently, so to speak and Julio C.

described it less violently than Poe."The Fall of the House of Usher" shows Poe's ability to create an emotional tone in his work, specifically feelings of fear, doom, and guilt These emotions center on Roderick Usher, who, like many Poe characters, suffers from an unnamed disease. Like the narrator in “The Tall Tale Heart, his disease inflames his hyperactive senses. The illness manifests physically but is based in Roderick's mental or even moral state. He is sick, it is suggested, because he expects to be sick based on his family's history of illness and is, therefore, essentially a hypochromic. Then in the other story the author explains differently

like,
The house, a very large mansion the pair inherited from their grandparents, is a large building divided in two living segments. At the entrance one enters a vestibule leading to the atrium, which consists of a living room, two bedrooms on either sides and, separated by a corridor, the kitchen and a bathroom. The second half of the house, entered through a massive oak door, contains the brother’s library, three other bedrooms and a dining room. Due to the disproportions between the surface of the residence and the daily needs of the two inhabitants, the second segment is entered only for cleaning purposes or for the occasional retrieving of a book from the library.

In conclusion to this these authors are very similar, but very different also. Edgar and Julio were both dark, gothic, and sick. They made stories that were sick and dark, but the stories are very good and you can learn a lot from these.