The Fall Of The House Of Usher Mood Essay

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Recommended: Short analysis of the story the fall of house of usher by edgar allan poe

The Mood of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe is the skilled author of The Fall of the House of Usher, a story that especially emphasizes mood and has the theme that fear is your worst enemy. He brings a feeling of mystery and eeriness to his readers by describing with colorful words the location and condition of the the House of Usher, the narrator’s thoughts, Usher’s strange disposition, and the peculiar circumstances under which the narrator decides to visit him. Poe’s use of mood follows the Gothic Romantic way of exploring the darker side of human nature. Edgar Allan Poe illustrates the House of Usher in great detail to evoke a mood of eeriness. When riding up to the house, the narrator looks “upon the bleak walls- upon the vacant eye-like windows- upon a few rank sedges- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees- with an utter depression of soul”(416). He uses particularly vivid words such as “bleak”, “vacant”, and “decayed” to convey the mood. Once inside, the narrator observes, …show more content…

The reader feels a certain morbid curiosity in the state of the house, and wonders what sort of person might be living there to let it go in such a way. The disturbed thoughts of the narrator and the nervous, outlandish disposition of Usher also contribute to the mood. His hysteria, manner of speaking, and constant nervousness rub off on the reader as “a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance”(425). The narrator serves as the perfect vessel through which the story comes, bending it to his interpretation so that the reader is almost forced to think of Usher by his fixed perspective, unable to distinguish their own feelings from those of the narrator. The mood, designed to evoke so much anxiousness and fear into the reader to drive the point home, is used to show the theme that fear is a person’s worst enemy. Extremely frightened by the idea of his own death, Usher

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