The Fall Of The House Of Usher Analysis

What Are You Scared Of? What really scares you? Is it a damp, misty fog covering a cemetery? A human figure dressed in decorative clothes, covered with blood? Could it be the sudden collapse and destruction of your surroundings? If your answer to any of the preceding questions is yes, then “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe is not the bedtime story for you. Through its setting, character descriptions, and helpless ending, Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” creates a diagram for horror novels that still terrifies readers today. Most people begin to experience fear when they find themselves in uncomfortable circumstances or surroundings. The narrator describes the surroundings of the Usher house as “an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn – a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernable, and leaden-hued” (6). Usher’s house was described by the narrator as “the

Roderick Usher is described as being “a cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely molded chin, speaking in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy, hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; – these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten” (8). The narrator further describes the reappearance of Lady Madeline of Usher as “blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame” (25). The mere presence of individuals fitting these descriptions are enough motivation and fear for me to part company from