The Fall Of The House Of Usher

5 Pages 1144 Words

Poe uses the imagery and the life-like characteristics of an otherwise decaying house as a device for giving the house a supernatural atmosphere. For example, from the very beginning of the story, the reader can tell that there is something unusual and almost supernatural about the building. As the narrator approaches the home of his long-time friend, Roderick Usher, he refers to the house as the “melancholy House of Usher”(1508). Upon looking at the building, he even describes the feeling he has as “a sense of insufferable gloom pervading my spirit”(1508). The windows appear to be “vacant,” and “eye-like” and the narrator goes on to observe the “rank sedges,” and the “black and lurid tarn,”(1509) in which he sees the reflection of the house. He later says, “when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew a strange fancy…”(1509). This statement indicates that perhaps the house does indeed have supernatural characteristic. The narrator !
observes the details of the house once more and finds that the house has fungi growing all over it and the masonry of the building is decaying. He says, “ there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the utterly porous, and evidently decayed condition of the individual stones”(1510). This observation suggests that perhaps something supernatural is holding the house intact; otherwise it would have fallen to the ground long ago.
Upon entering the house, the narrator sees the inside of the house as well as the odd behavior and personality of its inhabitants and is increasingly convinced that the house has some supernatural effect on those who live there. Upon meeting Usher, the narrator remarks, “…the physique of the gray walls and the turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence” (1512). The narrat...