I have used concrete and descriptive language by giving insight in to the character of Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and pointing out the tools Poe utilizes to make the story more impactful.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe is a mysterious type of story with a lot of twists and turns that throw the reader off just when one might suspect what is going to happen next. This story is about a troubled man named Roderick who has a disease of the mind and writes to an unnamed narrator for help. His sister, named Madeline, has a disease called catalepsy, which is a sickness which involves seizures. It is prophesized that she is going to unfortunately pass soon.
Roderick’s fears have kept him locked up in the mansion for years, and he has little to no sense of what the outside world is like. He claims that he is going to die of fear if he cannot find a way out of this state of mind he is currently living in. His friend is the unnamed narrator that comes to give him a hand in order to help Roderick become stable again. Unfortunately, when things seemed to be turning around, his terminally ill sister is found to be “dead” and so Roderick and his friend burry her without truly investigating her state. Poe describes that she had a color of blush on her cheeks when they buried her, and that leaves the reader to suspect that she might not just be dead, but instead in her cataleptic state. This investigation gives readers insight to what is going to happen at the end of this short story.
In the end, Roderick is more troubled than ever about his sister’s death. He fears that she may come back alive to haunt him. He is paranoid and simply mad, which takes a toll on his physical and mental wellbeing. His sister does indeed come back from the dead. It is said that she was not really dead in the first place, and so she woke up and busted out of her coffin. Readers cannot tell whether she is a figment of Roderick’s imagination, or if this is an actually true event in his life. What one knows is that the world is not as gloomy as Poe makes it out to be. “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be determined as a “detailed account of the derangement and dissipation of an individual’s personality.” In other words, even though this house makes Roderick feel safe, it actually helps pertain to this irreconcilable fracture in his personality, which leads him to be mentally and physically ill with little to no hope of ever breaking this lifestyle while inside the mansion.
reading between the heart 