The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe

Introduction

The short story "The Fall of House of Usher" was first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in 1839. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) revised it for his collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, published the following year. In the story, Roderick Usher, one of the final remaining descendants of the ancient Usher family, is now suffering from physical and emotional illness, and he sends a letter to his boyhood friend requesting his company during the days of his ill health. The boyhood friend, who narrates this disturbing tale of identity and struggling lineage, responds at once, only to find the Usher home to be in a state of decay and disrepair. Much like the home, the narrator finds that Roderick Usher, too, is not the person he once knew. Time and disease have taken a toll on him, as it has the entire Usher lineage, leaving Roderick and his sister as the sole survivors of the Ushers (Voloshin, 419).

Once inside the home, the narrator observes the rooms and long passages as he approaches the room where Roderick is found. Here, the narrator learns that Roderick suffers from nerves and fear, and the narrator comes to believe that Usher is afraid of his own home. The narrator tries to comfort his friend by listening to him play guitar and create lyrics for his music. The narrator also reads stories to Roderick, but nothing seems to be able to lift his spirits.

Edgar Allan Poe

A genius of macabre operatic plots and suspenseful pacing, Edgar Allan Poe earned the title of father of modern horror literature. In the power of describing imaginary, and even miraculous scenes, actions and events, Poe possesses a kind of similarity to Swift, and also to some of the writers in the Arabian Nights, and among the Hebrews, ancient Persians, and other Oriental fabulists; but while Poe's narratives excite an equally riveting interest and apprehension, they are not, for the most part, beautiful or poetical though we must admit several marked exceptions of somewhat depressing loveliness and melancholy fascination. As his literary skills developed, Poe applied them almost exclusively to writing gothic poems and stories. At the height of his melancholy, Poe coordinated the disparate elements of his genius—beauty, loss, death, and horror, all set in European or exotic settings (Evans, 137).

Poe was a master of the technical elements of verse, including caesura, inversion, repetition, and rhetorical question; equally, in prose, he had consummate skill in manipulating the drama of character duality, suspense, morbidity, intimidating atmosphere, unresolved conflict, and escalating psychotic obsession, the motivation in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat," both written in 1843. With regard to the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, they have been in certain instances mistaken by admirers in many parts of the world,—not for any rare qualities they really possess, but for something they have not.

"The Fall of the House of Usher"

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is the most popular of Poe's ...