Roderick Usher Mental Illness

After reading Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, Fall of the House of Usher, the audience is introduced to some very abnormally behaved characters, one of them being the main character Roderick Usher. Throughout the entire story Roderick Usher shows many signs of abnormal behavior and mental illness. From a psychoanalytic perspective he shows many symptoms and signs of schizophrenia.
While reading the story I noticed that many things that Roderick Usher did and said seemed very out of the ordinary, one of the very obvious signs of schizophrenia is incoherent speech and Roderick Usher is described to have it when the narrator says, “His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision…to that…of the drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium.”

From this quote we see that Roderick Usher has already begun to have slurred speech problems which was one piece of evidence that lead me to believe he had schizophrenia. Another piece of evidence that lead me to believe that Roderick Usher suffered from schizophrenia was when he and the narrator had buried his sister and afterwards he claimed to be disturbed by noises that caused him to not be able to fall asleep. Delusions and hallucinations are a huge sign of schizophrenia and the fact that Madeline was portrayed so ghostly may lead some to believe that Madeline was just a hallucination from Roderick Ushers mental illness. And the last piece of evidence that lead me to believe Roderick Usher had schizophrenia is kind of symbolic. The word schizophrenia quite literally means, “Splitting of the mind.” This is very symbolic when we look at the events that took place towards the end of the story. In the end after Madeline attacked Roderick Usher the house split directly in half. This image of the house splitting in half could be a direct representation of Roderick’s mental state and illness