Story Analysis and The Writer's Way

The Fall of the House Of Usher Analysis

      Receiving a letter from a child-hood friend, the narrator rushes to the house of Roderick Usher. Upon his arrival, he describes his  meeting of his friend, he notices Usher to be weak and nervous. He was a in a state of distress. Usher's sister Madeline has a strange illness that no doctor can explain.
      While the two are talking, the man catches a glimpse of Madeline, who doesn't show any outward signs of illness. The narrator is unsettled by her presence though he does not know why. Looking back to his friend, Roderick is even more distressed. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother—but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears"(Poe 7). Something has obvious disturbed the brother, and since nothing has happened except the presence of the sister, we can assume he felt her presence.

      The next few days the narrator and Mr.Usher participate in activities that were suppose to distract Mr. Usher from the ongoing events. Usher took to the guitar and sang a ballad called "The Haunted Palace". This is a reference to the ghastly, lonely appearance of the House of Usher. "But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!) And, round about his home, the glory That blushed and bloomed Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed"(Poe 9). Mr. Usher sings this ballad, but out of everything he could sing he sang this song of a desolate house, much like his own, that is haunted by evil, and the houses story is forgotten, just like the House Of Usher. The ballad and reality coincide, but what of the evil. Madeline seems pretty. 

     Usher says earlier,

"To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. “I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in

this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in

themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may

operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute

effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive

when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR". 

He knows something is going to happen to him. It's going to be bad, and he is completely terrified.
     He and the narrator go on to bury his sister. She is not buried in the family tomb however. She is buried in a room under the house. Roderick doesn't want her to be examined by doctors because of the mysteriousness of her condition.
     After the succession of a few days the inhabitants begin to feel strange. Usher comes to the narrator asking if he heard something. The narrator tries to calm him down by reading him a novel. That does not help the situation, because the events in the story are being echoed in reality. Usher starts muttering. Saying his sister was coming for him. That he should have known better than to bury her when she wasn't dead. He knows what's coming before it happens and just as the story and ballad foreshadowed, his sister comes to exact her revenge as an undead, as ghosts could not be so physical. She fights with her brother and he ends up dying.


The Writer's Way

        The writer's of Gothic fiction often criticize the nature of humans. They show this usually by having a character in their stories who revel in the negative aspects of our nature, brings out the negative aspects in others, or they are fighting against those aspects and ultimately fail. Most authors of this specific genre tend to lean towards the view that every human has a bad side to them, and fighting against that side is pointless, often having dire consequences. The stories written will never have a happy ending. The end will either be terribly strange or awful.