‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ represents a creation which has the purpose to express the terror, the unusual and also the shocking events. ‘ “The Fall of the House of Usher” probably measures as one of Poe’s greatest achievements in the short story, and it has admitted many approaches. The tale offers an anxiety-ridden narrator–protagonist, a haunted mansion tenanted by haunted siblings – who eventually come to “haunt” the storyteller – a mysterious doctor, whose intents seem to be nefarious.’ The narrator succeed to give to his story a sort of investigation of psychiatric stages of human mind . His old friend , Roderick Usher is that one whom the narrator had chosen to suffer for such psychiatric problems. He suffers by a mental depression, or better said by a mental disorder. He lives in a very strange house which sends a chill down to everyone who just tries to imagine how it is looking. But , most likely that it has to look in a such a way because only in a place like this a sick mind could live. Probably, Roderick Usher is another face of the narrator , an ‘alter ego’ who couldn’t be seen so easy. ‘The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.’ Throw this description made by the narrator can be seen how the house itself become a character which participates to the entire action. It seems like the house itself has it’s proper spirit. It’s a house in which the normality is totally absent, but something phantasmagoric lives there, something strange that anticipates all the horrors that happens inside. What that house can be ? Another face of mental disorder?
Referring to the fragments as that mentioned above, Poe said that his ,,horror doesn’t come from Germany, but from his soul ” So, it can be said that, in addition to be a narrator present in the action, Edgar Allan Poe represents the terrible house’s soul ; and by this way he tried to show a picture of what his soul really means and feels. In his book , cited below, Richard Ruland Malcom said ,on the other hand, that ‘ the narrator, a man of reason and analysis, enters a world where veils gradually fall until everything is inverted and even the house follows its mirror image into the tarn’ , but, all in all, he have to admit that Edgar Allan Poe is present in each character, in each room of the house, in each feeling that is transmitted throw the text . He is the entire creation, is a hidden description of the story. ‘The bleakness of the house, its “vacant eye-like windows,” the rank weeds and pale trunks of decayed trees nearby, mirror his own countenance and thus his own mindset.’
Edgar Allan Poe is wearing during the whole story the mask of normality through the medium of the narrator ,and puts the unusual, the supernatural, the horror and the terror on his character’s shoulders.
During the entire story , Edgar Allan Poe is constantly shocking his reader and create the illusion that more than what have happened before, couldn’t happen next, but Poe really has this ability, to transmit fear, fright and terror. His purpose is to shock, to put in front of his spectators an unusual and spectacular story which has no connection to normality.
And he succeed to shock throw the relation of Roderick Usher with his sister Madeline which is
far from what it seems. Apparently, Roderick says, when the narrator noted the resemblance between both of them, that this special , and unusual relationship that they have, is because they were twins . But, the truth was that there have had an incestuous relationship which is revealed
a little bit later. When his sister Madeline died, Roderick felt like he is dying too , from inside to outside. Madeline represent from him, part of his being. Biologically, this may happen to those who are twins, but we have to go further more in this affirmation, and say that here is not only this aspect which really counts, but the fact that Madeline is more than a sister, she is the half of his brother’s heart, and not in the sense that they are brethren. ‘Roderick as artist figure may suggest that he feels no bounds of ordinary human love or decency. He is, however, a “sick” artist in that his poem is horrifying, his music weird, his own situation mirrored in the blankness of his painting (which is nevertheless frightening), and his choice of readings bizarre.’ Here, we can find what we have said at the beginning of this essay , that Edgar Allan Poe shows in this story psychiatric stages of human mind. Here, in this point, is absolutely clear that there are a lot of psychiatric problems. And also, from here we can deduce why Roderick and Madeline had chosen to live in a such a house. An isolated one. That house embodies perfectly a troubled mind. ‘ Not accidentally does Poe give us a tale of disintegrating bodies, but, more important, disintegrating psyches as well, which he frames with a mansion that looks like a human head.’
So, by this point of analysis, we can deduce that nothing in the entire story happens accidentally. Definitively not . Surely, that the reason why Madeline come back to Roderick, is that they have to die together. The connection between them was absolutely powerful. And the power of incest made them inseparable.
Also, another thing that is not mentioned aimlessly is the crack formed in the middle of the house. It announces from the very beginning that that house is going to disappear, but this doesn’t become so clear until a lot of strange things reveal the imminent end of the story.
When the twins died, the house splited in half . That meant, spiritually, the end of an incestuous relationship, and physical, the end of a strange building. After all those things have passed, remains only the narrator who embodies the normality. But we don’t know if that was the normality, or the mask of it.
What is surprising is that in the end of the story , paradoxical, we haven’t an unexpected , supernatural and an out of the common end as the narrator accustomed us. What happens comes as a punishment for the sin of incest. After they died , the house also should disappear because it was absolutely necessary . How it can exist without what have happened inside it? It couldn’t .
Such a house needed sick minds. Without them, it meant nothing.
All of the events that have happened , is due to the fact that the author had chosen to lead the story on a way with no return. But, what dies in fact in the end is just an appearance of a mask of Edgar Allan Poe.
All in all, the themes, motifs, suggestions with which Edgar Allan Poe build this story are all of them a mirror of his soul . ’ "The Fall of the House of Usher," trying to order and systematize the processes of unreason Poe appears to be determining causes and principles from results, though we know they were appropriate principles for him.’
He outlined a style in the American Literature , and not only, because also in Romanian Literature he inspired a lot of authors like Mateiu Caragiale, Ion Barbu, Mihai Eminescu etc. that absolutely fall in love with this style of writing, and a lot of his themes , motifs and suggestions( death, night, fright, darkness and so on) can be found in their creations. And by this, Edgar Allan Poe is living forever in his creations, but also in the creations of others authors from a lot of countries.