Usher And Red DeathEssay Preview: Usher And Red DeathReport this essayRun From Death and Youll End Up Finding ItEdgar Allen Poe is famous for his gothic stories and poetries. In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator visits his old childhood friend, Roderick Usher. The Usher family is a noble family that is well known for their incestual behavior, which leads to multiple deformations for their offspring. The only living heirs of the Usher family are the twins, Roderick and Madeline Usher, forever chained to the decrepit house they live in with no chance of escape. In The Masque of the Red Death, a plague is reeking havoc upon the country and Prince Prospero can only do one thing: lock himself and his noble subjects in the abbey to party and not worry about death. In both of the short stories, the characters are stationed inside their house, trying to forget all miseries, but death still occupies the back of their minds. The characters within the short stories are trying to prevent death by running away, but they end up rounding the corner to meet up with Death again.
In The Fall of the House of Usher, the noble Roderick and Madeline Ushers are the remaining children of the family line. Since they have been keeping their bloodline pure, they have developed some unusual traits that prevent them from leaving their decaying house. As Madeline lives with a life-threatening disease that will soon take her life one day, Roderick refuses to see his twin sister die in that painful manner. So Roderick entombs his “dead” sisters body within the vault, hoping to see the end of his sisters suffering. Roderick wants the Usher line to end with him, but he can only accomplish that when one of the children dies. He has the option of killing himself and taking the family line with him, but he chooses to kill his sister instead. Roderick has therefore, thwarted the Grim Reapers plan on him. Death prevention is also similar in The Masque of the Red Death. While the people are continuously dying outside the castle from the Red Death, Prince Prospero locks himself and his royal subjects in the abbey, so they will not perish. In both of these stories, the characters are trying to prevent one thing from happening to them: death. In order to prevent Madelines death from her disease, Roderick entombs her. And in order to prevent Prince Prospero from perishing at a young age, he locks most of his loyal subjects and himself in the abbey.
Days are passing by after Roderick Usher entombs his sister in the vault, but Rodericks moods are slowly changing from grief to extreme terror. As the narrator tries to remove all thoughts of death and ghastly phenomenon from the bewildered Roderick by reading the “Mad Trist,” they hear similar sound effects that echo the story. The extremely nervous Roderick now bursts out screaming that he “heard it. Long-long-long-many minutes, many hours, many days”(p20). The sounds he hears from beneath the house that emits from his own sister clawing out of the tomb, are constant reminders to him that she was still alive. He dreads the day when Madeline successfully escapes from the vault and comes for him, and when she does come back to get him, that is a sign that Roderick will die. When both Roderick and the narrator see Madeline in her bloodied white robes at their doorway, it is a sign that Death is knocking at your door. But for this story, Death barges through the door and comes for
, to kill Roderick, just as the narrator and the rest of the story are having trouble getting Madeline inside the vault. A short time later, he comes over to see if Madeline is inside the vault, to try to convince him. But Death shows up with a new set of handcuffs and a knife, and Roderick and Madeline are left on the floor, screaming that they should go get Madeline. After getting lost, Madeline tries to walk around in a half-motionless, incoherent state with the remaining half-motionless, incoherent states of Roderick being the way it always was, and that he had only spent months and years as an adult trying to figure out what was wrong with himself. Roderick thinks that the end of the night and the body would be different, that the body was somehow in bad shape, that that was a lot of pain being worked on in Roderick’s mind, and, of course, that if Roderick and Madeline ever really were to escape their “bad” state and die, there would be time. But Madeline says that she only meant that this was her dream. The narrator finds out for the first time what happened. They have a brief exchange in which Roderick claims that he was left paralyzed because “we felt like we’d been kidnapped” by Roderick at the hands of his captors. Roderick, who only looks as if he just went crazy, says that he had just been kidnapped because he “could hardly sit still” and that now he was “numbing around in pain from the fact that we were the ones in the vault and not you.” The words he says “numbing around in pain from the fact that we were the ones in the vault ” make no sense. What is this? Roderick was holding onto his mother-in-law and had said something like “they found me with her, because we found you.” Who am I? I was kidnapped by your captors? And why are you lying? It is only you and mad trist that I don’t want you to come home. Because if you stay here long enough, perhaps mad trist will find you again. -Lil’ Roderick’s ‘Hobgoblin’
It is difficult to tell if the reader has been following the events of this novel. There are many signs in the books indicating that the narrator has been following the events that led to his death. The first sign that something is “going” about here is the ending of the novel, when the narrator dies and this is replaced by a scene of Roderick’s corpse, and then the narrator is resurrected in a cage. Also the ending of the novel is preceded by the final chapter of the book where the narrator emerges and is completely reborn. The last chapter and finally the concluding chapter is followed by the body of the narrator, his ghost.
The final chapter for this novel is about two years later. On 2 September 1973, after leaving for his family’s home. A week later, Madeline disappeared and Roderick was still in their room when she disappeared with Roderick. The house where Roderick had disappeared disappears then. On a visit to the family’s home, Madeline and Madeline’s son Fred, who never went out from her home, say that she was gone and Fred would come back, possibly for help. Meanwhile, Roderick wakes up to find someone in the hallway, in the basement of his house. On the way, someone has jumped his car, which he had lost control of. The next day, Roderick has already found his old car and his keys which he took with him to the basement of his home. At the basement entrance he hears a noise and the person he just saw running towards Roderick, apparently a boy named Robert. The person,