Fall In The House Of Usher

The Fall in the House of Usher, uses a rational first person narrative to illustrate the strange effects the house has on the three characters. Everything about the house is dark and supernaturally evil. The house appears to create fear, which is in turn, driving the occupants insane.
The narrator of the story is a mysterious and difficult to understand. The audience is never given the name of the narrator as his significance in the novel is only in relation to the Ushers. When the narrator enters the house he immediately is suspicious of the Usher family. He instantly takes note of the isolation and closed-off nature of the siblings. With the narrator Poe is trying to show that the denial of fears can lead to insanity, as seen also in the

As Roderick explains that he has not left the house in years, with his only companion being his sister, the narrator picks up on the gloomy and haunting state of the house:
“While the objects around me – while the carvings of the ceilings, the somber tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy – while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this – I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up”

“I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. […] I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror. In this unnerved – in this pitiable condition – I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.” (70)
This is the part of the story where the narrator first sees that Roderick is not afraid of death or pain, but instead, he is afraid of fear itself. This is in fact a foreshadowing of what is to come as we find out later that fear is in fact the reason for his ultimate death. When his sister Lady Madeline returns from the death, Roderick is so overwhelmed with fear from the situation, that the reoccurrence of Lady Madeline scares him to death. As the narrator becomes aware of Roderick’s true fears Poe makes the reader see that the narrator himself is beginning to feel these same