THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

How It All Goes Down

An unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher, a very creepy mansion owned by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher.
Roderick has been sick lately, afflicted by a disease of the mind, and wrote to his friend, our narrator, asking for help. The
narrator spends some time admiring the awesomely spooky Usher edifice. While doing so, he explains that Roderick and
his sister are the last of the Usher bloodline, and that the family is famous for its dedication to the arts (music, painting,
literature, etc.). Eventually, the narrator heads inside to see his friend.

Roderick indeed appears to be a sick man. He suffers from an "acuteness of the senses," or hyper-sensitivity to light,
sound, taste, and tactile sensations; he feels that he will die of the fear he feels. He attributes part of his illness to the fact
that his sister, Madeline, suffers from catalepsy (a sickness involving seizures) and will soon die, and part of it to the belief
that his creepy house is sentient (able to perceive things) and has a great power over him. He hasnt left the mansion in
years. The narrator tries to help him get his mind off all this death and gloom by poring over the literature, music, and art
that Roderick so loves. It doesnt seem to help.

As Roderick predicted, Madeline soon dies. At least we think so. All we know is that Roderick tells the narrator shes
dead, and that she appears to be dead when he looks at her. Of course, because of her catalepsy, she might just look
like shes dead, post-seizure. Keep that in mind. At Rodericks request, the narrator helps him to entomb her body in one
of the vaults underneath the mansion. While they do so, the narrator discovers that the two of them were twins and that
they shared some sort of supernatural, probably extrasensory, bond.

About a week later, on a dark and stormy night, the narrator and Usher find themselves unable to sleep. They decide to
pass away the scary night by reading a book. As the narrator reads the text aloud, all the sounds from the fictional story
can be heard resounding from below the mansion. It doesnt take long for Usher to freak out; he jumps up and declares
that they buried Madeline alive and that now she is coming back. Sure enough, the doors blow open and there stands a
trembling, bloody Madeline. She throws herself at Usher, who falls to the floor and, after "violent" agony, dies along with
his sister. The narrator flees; outside he watches the House of Usher crack in two and sink into the dark, dank pool that
lies before it.

On a dark and gloomy autumn day, our narrator approaches the House of Usher, the sight of which renders the
day even gloomier than before. He notes the houses eye-like windows and feels a depression of soul that is
comparable only to the way an opium addict feels when he comes back to reality (1).
He cant decide exactly why he feels so miserable, so he concludes that there are just some weird things in life
you cant explain.
The narrator approaches the tarn (read: lake) that lies near the house, and gazes down into it so as to examine
the inverted reflection of the house rather than the house itself. But its still creepy-looking. He again notes the
eye-like windows which would suggest this is an important detail (1).
He reveals that hes planning on spending a few weeks here. The owner of the house, Roderick Usher, is a
boyhood friend of his. Recently, the narrator received a letter from Usher revealing Ushers illness, a mental
disorder that oppressed him. Usher begged his friend to come to the house and try to figure out what was wrong
with him. So the narrator agreed.
Although they were friends in childhood, the narrator actually knows very little about Usher, as he was always
excessively and habitually reserved. His very ancient family is famous for its devotion to the arts music and
paintings and has given a fair amount of money in support of these activities. (3).
The narrator has also heard that the Usher family has no branches; that is, there is only a direct blood line from
their ancestors. For this reason, the name of the estate, The House of Usher, has come to refer both to the
house itself and the family who owns it. There also seem to be similarities between the character of the house
and the supposed characters of the Ushers.
Looking up at the house, the narrator feels as though about the whole mansion and domain there hung [] an
atmosphere [], a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued (4).
More on the house: its very old, but it seems to be in great shape except for a very tiny crack that runs from the
roof down the front of the house.
 But enough of that. The narrator rides his horse to the house and is greeted by a servant. He is taken by a valet
to see Usher, and on the way determines that all the objects inside the house carvings, tapestries, trophies
give him much the same feeling that the outside of the house did.
When the narrator enters his room, Usher stands and greets his friend. The narrator is shocked at how much
Usher has changed since they last saw each other. His skin is very pale, his eyes seem to glow, and his hair
seems to float above his head (8).
Usher has a nervous agitation that renders him largely incoherent. He launches in to a discussion of his illness.
This, he says, is a family illness. It heightens all of his senses so that light hurts his eyes, he can only eat bland
foods and only wear certain clothes, and most sounds make him miserable.
Usher is a slave to terror, notes the narrator. He feels he will die from it, and quite soon. Its not even the illness
itself thats so bad but the fear of all the events which may cause him pain. According to Usher, this fear is what
will be the death of him.
He is also, it turns out, a very superstitious fellow. Usher hasnt left his house in several years, and hes under the
impression that his familys mansion has obtained an influence over his spirit, that its the houses fault he feels so
gloomy.
On the other hand, he also feels gloomy because his sister, Madeline, his last living relative and his only
companion for the last several years, has been ill for a long time and will soon be dead. As Usher is speaking,
Madeline walks slowly in a distant part of the house and the narrator catches sight of her, though she does not
notice him. Usher buries his head in his hands and cries with "many passionate tears."
No one has been able to figure out why Madeline is so sick. The doctors think that she is just gradually wasting
away and that she is partially cataleptical. The night the narrator arrived she took to bed.
For the next several days the narrator tries to help Usher out of his melancholy. They paint, or read, or he listens
to Usher play the guitar. But the closer they get, the more the narrator thinks his efforts are futile.
The narrator was often awed by the artistic productions of Usher, which he cant really describe for his readers in
words. He painted intense, abstract, mood-driven pieces. One painting in particular the narrator remembers
vividly: a long corridor below the earth, bathed in eerie light though there was no light source to be found.
Similarly, one of Ushers ballads stayed in the narrators mind. He recounts the song stanza by stanza for his
readers. It is called, perhaps unsurprisingly, The Haunted Palace, and tells the story of a glorious, beautiful
palace destroyed by evil things (19).
This reminds the narrator: Usher firmly believes that his house is sentient, or capable of perceiving things. The
evidence for his claim lies, he believes, in the condensation of an atmosphere which lies about the mansion
(20).
In addition to music and art, the two men spend a lot of time reading the books in Ushers library.
One night, Usher informs the narrator that Madeline is dead. Hes afraid that her doctors will want to autopsy or
otherwise experiment on her, since her illness was so bizarre. So Usher wishes to entomb her underneath the
mansion, in one of its many vaults, for two weeks, until her proper burial. The narrator agrees to help Usher move
the body.
The two men together carry Madeline to the vault. The narrator notes that the underground chamber lies directly
underneath his own room in the mansion.
As they place Madeline into the coffin, the narrator notes, for the first time, how similar she looks to Usher. Usher
responds that they were in fact twins, and that they shared a connection which could hardly be understood by an
outsider.
The narrator also notes that Madelines cheeks are flushed and her lips pink. Then they screw the coffin closed.
Over the next few days, Ushers countenance changes. He neglects his ordinary duties, looks even more pale,
and has lost the luster in his eyes. The narrator feels though Ushers mind is burdened with some oppressive
secret. He stares into nothingness and seems to be listening to imaginary sounds.
The narrator also finds that he himself is subject to Ushers superstitions. About seven or eight nights after putting
Madeline in the tomb, the narrator feels nervous and scared and cant get to sleep. There is a storm raging, but in
the quiet interludes he thinks he can hear eerie sounds coming from the mansion. He dresses and begins pacing
back and forth.
Then he sees Usher in the hallway. The man looks crazy, but the narrator figures any company is preferable to
being terrified alone.
Usher wants to know if the narrator has seen it (28). He throws open the windows to the raging storm outside,
and huge, powerful gusts of wind begin raging through the room. Outside, the narrator can see an eerie, glowing,
gaseous cloud surrounding the mansion.
He tries to assure Usher that it is simply an electrical phenomenon, perfectly explainable through science. He
then sits his friend down and begins to read aloud to him in order to pass the night away.
 The narrator begins reading The Mad Trist by Sir Launcelot Canning. After some time he gets to the part where
Ethelred, the hero, tries to break his way into the dwelling of a hermit. As Ethelred breaks down the door in the
story, the narrator and Usher can hear the sounds of a door being smashed through.
Usher, meanwhile, has turned his chair around to face the door to the chamber.
The narrator, for lack of a better option, continues reading. As he reads about the sounds of a shield clanging to
the ground, he hears the actual sounds reverberating through the palace.
Usher begins speaking. Yes, he says, Usher hears it too, has heard it for many nights now, yet dared not speak
of it. Then he reveals to the narrator that they buried Madeline alive. These sounds they have heard are the
sounds of Madeline breaking out of her coffin and making her way out of the underground vault. Madman! he
screams, I tell you that she now stands without the door! (40).
At just that (appropriate) moment, a gust of wind blows the doors to the bedchamber open, and indeed there
stands Madeline, bloodied and bruised. She rushes forward and falls upon her brother, who collapses to the
ground, dead.
The narrator, a tad bit put off by all of this, runs terrified from the mansion. The storm outside is still raging. He
sees a bright light on the path before him and turns around to the house to see where it is coming from. The
moon, it seems, is shining through that tiny crack in the house that he noticed at his first arrival. As he looks back
at the house, the fissure widens; the entire house splits in two and then falls, sinking into the tarn (lake) below.

Madness: The Fall of the House of Usher is the story of a sick man whose fears manifest themselves through his
supernatural, sentient family estate. (Sentient means able to perceive things.) The story explores both physical and
mental illness, and the effect that such afflictions have on the people closest to those who are sick. One interpretation is
that much of the seeming madness of the main character does turn out, in fact, to be the cause of truly supernatural
events. That is, hes not crazy his house really is haunted, and his sister really is back from the dead. Another
interpretation is that the madness really is imaginary.

Family: Usher explores a family so bizarre, so self-isolating, so removed from normalcy that their very existence has
become eerie and supernatural. The bond between the featured brother and sister characters is intense and inexplicable
possibly its supernatural, possibly its incestuous. Their bond transcends even death. One interpretation of the tale is
that the siblings are actually one person split in two; thus one is unable to survive without the other.

Isolation: This story explores a family so isolated from the rest of the world that theyve developed their own supernatural
barriers to interacting with it. The House of Usher exists in its own reality, governed by its own rules and with no interest in
others. Such extreme isolation forces the family members closer and closer to each other, again to a supernatural
degree, and inexplicable to any outsider.

Fear: For Roderick Usher fear itself is worse than whatever you actually fear. In fact, fear is responsible for at least one of
the deaths in this story. One possible interpretation of the tale is that the fear of some dreaded occurrence actually
manifests it in reality; that is, because the protagonist fears his death, he brings about his death.

Identity: One interpretation of The Fall of the House of Usher is that it presents a dramatized interpretation of a split-
personality disorder. At the least, the tale explores different aspects of identity and the ways in which those aspects might
be fractioned or made distinct. Differences between the physical and the mental parts of the self are emphasized and
explored in the text, as well as the way that parts of the self interact.

REALITY AND ART

Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory

You might have noticed a strange mingling of the fictional with the real in this story. Rodericks artistic creations have a
definite connection with what happens to the House of Usher. He paints an underground tomb; Madeline is entombed
underground. He sings about the decline of a house; the House of Usher declines. He screams that the dead Madeline is
standing at the door and so she is at the door. In fact, way back the beginning of the story Roderick declares that will
die from fear, which in fact comes true at the end of the tale.

One possibility is that Roderick, with his magic, lustrous eye, can foresee the future. He knows these events will transpire
and so he prophecies them aloud. Another possibility is that Roderick actually causes these things to happen, so that he
is consumed by fear he manifests his fear in reality, along with the help of some magic pixie dust from his haunted
mansion.

ANALYSIS: SETTING

Where It All Goes Down

Haunted Mansion, Several Dark and Stormy Nights

(To be fair, this was probably less of a clich when Poe wrote Usher.) Notice that we dont know the geographical
location nor a specific year when these events go down. The fact is, the mood and atmosphere in the setting is far more
important than the facts of time and place. And it certainly is a powerful atmosphere that Poe creates. The outside of the
mansion is the first of many spooky settings Poe renders in his tale. Youve got an ethereal glowing cloud and a dark and
scary lake, not to mention the ominous fissure running down the center of the mansion. He creates a different but equally
scary setting inside the mansion, where the corridors, though filled with seemingly ordinary objects, seem to scream
YOU ARE IN A HORROR STORY. The dank underground tomb is yet another of the masterfully-crafted mini-settings in
Usher, one we actually recognize from the Rodericks painting earlier in the text (make sure you check out Symbols,
Imagery, Allegory for some juicy, painting-related thoughts).

The house itself is carefully crafted to heighten the mood and atmosphere of the story, like the creepy tapestries and
furnishings inside. The fact that Usher hasnt left the house in ages lends the tale a sense of claustrophobia. In fact, the
narrator himself doesnt leave until the storys end which makes us, the reader, feel just as trapped as Roderick. The
houses sentience is also a big deal the physical setting of the story is as supernatural as its action and themes. Then
theres the fall of the house itself, which we discuss in Whats Up With the Title?

ANALYSIS: NARRATOR POINT OF VIEW

Who is the narrator, can she or he read minds, and, more importantly, can we trust her or him?

First Person (Peripheral Narrator)

The narrator is nameless, which suggests that his principal job is to narrate. We dont know much about him, and our attention is drawn
instead to the strangeness going down in the House of Usher; its the narrators place to take us on a tour of the Mansion de Fear.

One of the most interesting things this narrator does is insist, over and over again, that all attempts to accurately portray the weird
happenings of the House of Usher are essentially futile. Observe:

an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated. (12)

I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me. (16)

I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. (16)

I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. (20)

Its almost like hes trying to make a point here. Poe renders his story even more horrifying, even more bizarre, by claiming that its
even scarier and crazier than it sounds in his story. Whatever the narrator says was going on, take his word for it what actually went
down was worse.

You might want to think about the implications of this given that the narrator at one point reads aloud to Usher from a book and that the
fictional sounds are manifested in reality. Here the narrator is insisting that words cannot describe reality and yet the words he reads
aloud to Usher come true! In fact, these fictional words he reads are prophetic. This is similar to the way that Usher predicts his own
death early in the narrators tale. You might also want to think about the prophetic nature of narration in this text, given that Usher
foretells his own death. Well talk about this more in Symbols, Imagery, Allegory.
 ANALYSIS: TONE

Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?

Deliberate
The Fall of the House of Usher tells a terrifying story, and the narrator is up front and center for the most bizarre parts. But its
important to note that this tale is told in retrospect, so the deliberate authorial tone isnt at all compromised by the frantic mania of a
horrified narrator. For example, take a look at this second-to-last paragraph: For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and
fro upon the threshold,then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now
final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated. (41) Poes story unfolds in a careful
and calm manner, keeping its respectful distance from the more inexpressible details (see Point of View) and maintaining perspective
on all the crazy goings-on. In a way, this calm approach to such abnormal events is a bit horrifying in itself; the author treats the tale the
same way you might disclose a trip to the grocery store.