Examples Of Foreshadowing In The Fall Of The House Of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe may be the most literate madman to ever have lived. As a boy, he took an interest in poetry, and as he cultivated his poetic abilities, he began to write short stories that reflected his life. When Poe’s wife died and he took up drinking, his stories only waxed in depth and meaning since they were already rife with thought and emotion. Possibly suffering from manic depression, Poe wrote as a way to vent his mind and convey the ideas he had during his episodes. In one of his short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, an anonymous narrator meets with Roderick Usher, his decrepit friend from the past, before watching him and the House of Usher crumble. Utilizing tone, motifs, and foreshadowing, Poe establishes his belief that time and isolation is the ultimate cause of demise.

Poe, with his

less-than-conversational vocabulary, adopts a negative tone to tell us how he feels. Upon encountering Roderick, the narrator describes that he “suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses;...the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light.” In the subsequent context, we notice that Roderick is slowly losing his grip on reality. Poe’s dark tone of voice in the quote suggests this happened because he has spent so many years alone. Words with evil connotation, like suffered, morbid, oppressive, and tortured, support his suggestion. Later, toward the end of the story, the narrator says he “saw that [Roderick] spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur,...bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.” Poe writes with a more hurried, yet still dark, tone of voice to describe the fact that Roderick has gone completely mad. We can see the point where Roderick’s insanity culminated, and Poe’s tone insists that he flew over the cuckoo’s nest due to his solitude.

Amid The Fall of the House of Usher appear the motifs of atmosphere and countenance. Poe repeatedly addresses the atmosphere of the scene, with the first occasion near the beginning of the story. When the narrator enters the House of Usher, he senses “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven,” implying that the House of Usher, over time, had lost its celestic luster it once exhibited. Then, moments before finding Roderick, the narrator “breathed in an atmosphere of sorrow...an air of stern, deep, irredeemable gloom…” Finally, after the entombment of Roderick’s sister Madeline, the narrator’s torch is “half smothered in [the tomb’s] oppressive atmosphere…” The recurrent reference to atmosphere allows us to see the progression of demise over time spent alone. In addition to the echoed atmosphere, Poe paints the countenance over and over to show the collapse of Roderick and the House of Usher. At first, the narrator comments that “the character of his face had been at all times remarkable.” His lips, “of a surpassingly beautiful curve,…[and] a nose of a delicate Hebrew model...made up altogether a countenance not easily forgotten.” That passage illustrates that the narrator still respects his old friend, even though the rest of his physical appearance disintegrated. However, nigh the climax, Roderick’s “eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity.” Following the account of his appearance, a soliloquy spoken by Roderick demonstrates his lack of connection with the outside world, and the expiration of his mind due to sequestration.

The use of foreshadowing appears frequently in The Fall of the House of Usher which helps us anticipate the process of destruction that Roderick and the House of Usher undergo.

In the very beginning, the narrator “looked upon the scene before [him]...upon the vacant eye-like windows...” The view unnerved him, but he wasn’t yet sure why. As he neared the house, he again noticed “the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.” Finally sitting down with Roderick, the narrator elaborates upon his “large, liquid, and luminous-beyond-comparison” eyes. These all foreshadow the scene where Roderick loses his sanity, identified by the remark that “the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out.” Additionally, foreshadowing the post-climax scene, Poe identifies a “barely perceptible fissure” running down the wall of the mansion. After fleeing the House of Usher, the narrator speaks, noting that as “this fissure widened...my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder.” The change from an inconspicuous crack to a fissure on which the house splits exemplifies the idea that solitude is the cause of the fall of the House of

Usher.

Tone, motifs, and foreshadowing show that isolation ultimately causes demise in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. As a Thesaurus Master, Poe used exactly which words he needed in order to express his feelings, yet also repeated certain words to convey his ideas that needed to stand out. Without a drink or two, Poe’s mental stability might have stopped his work from reaching the level of emotional intensity that it did. His alcoholism and his vast experience with poetry amalgamated in harmony as he wrote down the strange things that wandered into his mind. For this reason, Poe is likely the greatest alcoholic to write.