The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is the story of an enlightenment-type charater entering into the old house of his friend Roderick Usher in hopes of helping him. The "House of Usher" respresents two different things. The "House of Usher" can be used to refer to both the building itself and the family of the Ushers. However their remains only one surviving member of the family of the Ushers, and as such the lone member is named the "House of Usher". Roderick Usher is the only remaining member of the old House of Usher being that his entire family including his twin sister had died. Something strange happens to Roderick in fact. Only a few years after his childhood, Roderick begins to age, and takes on the appearance of a weak and pale man. Roderick also changes in that his senses grow weaker and he can only be appealed by the most grim and ghastly of sounds, tastes, and sights. The final and most important of Roderick's changes was that of fear. Roderick was constantly filled with fear of something unknown to the narrator. These same charateristics were also present in the build itself of the House of Usher. The building itself looked old, broken, decaying, and grim. Finally when the narrator described the building itself he said that he could feel that something was wrong with the presence of the building but he could not understand it.

The narrator came to the House of Usher at the request of Roderick, who wanted the narrator to help and support him after the death of his sister, and to help him cure the "disease" of the House of Usher. The narrator tried to help Roderick by a series of methods such as painting and reading, but Roderick could not be cured of his fear and grim attitude. The narrator also helps Roderick put his "dead" sister in a secure vault where she would wait for two weeks until being buried. Eventually, one stormy night strange sounds are heard throughout the house and Roderick comes, with fear, to meet with the narrator. The narrator decides to try to calm Roderick by reading him the first book he finds, "The 'Mad Trist' of Sir Launcelot Canning". Soon the sounds of the book come to life and as the narrator reads the book, Roderick and the narrator both become scared until Roderick finally confesses that his sister in fact is not dead and is "living". At that moment Roderick's sister bursts through the wall covered in blood and kills her brother. The narrator then runs away terrified. Finally when the narrator turns around, a safe distance outside, A vertical crack opens up, with a bloody tint (from the moon), and the entire House of Usher falls and is broken.

The story of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a gothic, anti-enlightenment story, which clearly gives the idea that not only are there some things which are not entirely explainable but that some things want to destory you. In this story, both one man and his sister age rapidly and begin to suffer strange unexplianable symptoms. The sister seems to die. She appears and acts dead at first, but suddenly one night she breaks out of her locked coffin and locked iron door, and weakly arrives in the room where Roderick and the narrator are standing which she breaks a way open through the wall and kills her brother. This is entirely unexplainable in which a dead figure can not only break out of her own prison, but also can have the strength to destroy a wall and kill her brother. The final unreasonable event of the story was the eventual fall of the House of Usher. The House itself was riped apart from top to bottom by a crack that was unnoticable at first but after the death of Roderick, it opened itself quickly until the House of Usher was gone. The entire story builds up to the fear of this one night in which the most unreasonable happens in an attack against the one who knew it would happen. Not only are some things unable to be fully understood but these unknowable things also want to kill you and you cannot stop them.

This idea of the unknowable wanting to harm you parellels with Poe's "The Raven" in which the raven's presence not only brings harm to the narrator but also is certain and can never be avoided or removed. Here the fear and fall of the House of Usher cannot be stopped. Lady Madeline of Usher will come and kill her brother, and Roderick cannot stop her.

If some things are truely unknowable and also harmful to us, then how can we hope to avoid these things in hopes of survival? Are we just to be left in hopelessness to accept out eventual death?