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   scarletpimpernel Teacher
   High School - 12th Grade

   eNotes Editor

   Poe uses Roderick Usher to demonstrate the grip that paranoia can have on a human.  Usher is already fragile when the narrator arrives at the Usher family home.  Roderick's sister Madeline suffers from a strange form of sleepwalking and soon dies.  At this point, Roderick succumbs to paranoia by hearing sounds from the crypt that no one else can hear and by becoming extremely agitated by all sensory stimulation.  The narrator, near the story's end, describes Roderick as having

   "a species of mad hilarity in his eyes--an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor."

   For Roderick Usher, paranoia spreads from a psychological state to a physical one, and Poe seems to suggest that one person's paranoia has the power to infect others.

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   Posted by scarletpimpernel on Friday October 2, 2009 at 2:48 PM