Essay About Soundless Day And Narrator Travels

Edgar Allan Poe – Fall of the House of Usher
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Poes Fall
Edgar Allan Poes “The Fall of the House of Usher” is
clearly one of his most well known short stories. Well over a
hundred years after this story was written the basic elements of
fear are being used today in cinematic and written works. In
essence there are two elements that need to be understood to
understand this story; the plot of the story, and the critical
interpretations of tone and style to Poes story.
To understand any of the basic ideas of an story the reader
must understand the plot of a story. On a “dull , dark, and
soundless day in the autumn of the year” the narrator travels to
visit his boyhood companion, Roderick Usher. The House of
Usher looks out upon a “black and lurid tarn” and is surrounded by
decaying vegetation. The narrator is depressed and unnerved by
his melancholy surroundings. As he peers at the image of the
house in the water, he fancies there is an atmosphere peculiar to
the whole area, “a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly
discernible, and leaden-hued.” Before he enters the mansion he
notices that its entire front is covered by minute fungi. A valet
conducts him through intricate passages to the rooms of Roderick
Usher, whom he finds greatly changed. His complexion is
cadaverous, his eyes unusually bright, and he is suffering from ”
excessive nervous agitation.” The morbid acuteness of his senses
makes him shun food, light and sound, except in their mildest
forms. His condition is complicated by the wasting away of his
sister Madeline who is slowly dying of an unknown disease. The
narrator attempts to relieve the melancholy of his friend. They
read and paint together, and Usher sometimes plays the guitar.
The narrator realizes that he cant cheer his friend who has
obviously entered on purpose a world of strange spiritual reality.
He and Madeline ar the last of his and the evil genius of the family
seems to demand that they investigate modes of being that are
unknown to other men. He accompanies his wild impromptus on
the guitar with rhymed lyrics. One of his poems, titled ” The
Haunted Palace,” speaks of evil things which overthrow a kingdom
of wisdom and light. The Lady Madeline dies, and at Ushers
request his friend helps him to enter the coffin temporarily in
a vault in the basement of the mansion. They open the coffin for a
last look at the deceased and notice “a faint blush upon the bosom
and the face,” a charactreistic, the narrator tells us, of deaths sue to
catalepsies. In the days following the interment of his sister.
Roderick ignores his ordinary occupations and wanders through
the hose aimlessly. At times he appears to be listening in profound
attention to some sound that only he can hear. One stormy night
the narrator is unable to sleep to a window, and upon looking out
his friend perceives that “a faintly luminous and distinctly visible
gaseous exhalation” hangs about the mansion. In an effort to calm
the hypersensitive Roderick his friend reads to him, but is
interrupted by a knock at the door. Usher cries out that it is his
sister at the door, whom he knows they had put living in the tomb.
The Lady Madeline enters, bloody, and falls upon her brother who
dies of fright as they collapse to the floor. The narrator rushes
from the mansion, and as he is riding away there is a sound “like
the voice of a thousand waters,” and the House of Usher sinks
below