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The Fall of the House of Usher
Initially, the narrator describes the house of Usher as having a "peculiar sensibility" and only a direct line of descent with no side branches, something hinting perhaps at incest or inbreeding....
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The Fall of the House of Usher
"The Fall of the House of Usher" can be read as having both supernatural elements and as a psychological drama. Roderick Usher, by his own admission, suffers from psychological illness. As the...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
At the beginning of the short story, the narrator describes the House of Usher as a gloomy, eerie, decrepit home which permeates the surrounding atmosphere with terror and despair. The narrator...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
At the end of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," both Roderick and his sister Madeline, the last of the Usher family, are dead. More specifically, Madeline escapes from her tomb...
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Literature
The narrator describes the entire setting and his own mood in the first five paragraphs of the story and then mentions, almost as an incidental observation, a flaw in the front of the big...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Isolated for years inside the Usher house, Roderick's imagination overcomes reason as his seclusion creates a confining and unnatural environment. This bizarre environment engenders his imaginative...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
During the storm, Roderick Usher insists on opening a casement (window) so that the narrator can experience the "whirlwind" outside as the wind changes directions, along with the dense clouds and...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is an example of Gothic literature and should not be considered a parody of the genre. Admittedly, it can sometimes be difficult to understand the...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The Ushers' ancestral curse is madness. It is not entirely clear what has caused the Usher family's ancestral curse. Obviously, both the brother and sister suffer from something the doctor cannot...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
I will give you two theories on this. One is that the whole thing is in the narrator’s head and the comments about how she seemed to be alive made him imagine her coming out of the tomb. The...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
When the narrator finally reaches Roderick Usher, the latter lies on his couch for a period of time before getting up to greet him. Although Usher at first shows a degree of vivacity born from his...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
We are led to believe one of Roderick Usher's problems in "The Fall of the House of Usher" comes from his excessively poetic -- or artistic -- imagination. This poetic imagination is morbid, as are...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
In The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator is going to visit Roderick Usher, a friend of his from childhood. Roderick had sent him a letter, requesting that he come visit because Roderick was...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The narrator experiences a strong feeling of dread as he approaches the house and sees the desolate, blighted landscape, but it is not until he draws closer that he discerns distinct marks of decay...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Imagination is central to Poe's story. First, the reader is invited to engage in Roderick Usher's insistence that his home is a living and evil organism: He was enchained by certain superstitious...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
A hyperbole is an exaggerated statement or claim that is not meant to be taken literally. My son likes to use hyperbole when he is hungry. "Dad, I am so hungry! When are we going to eat? I'm...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The uncanny or unheimlich is the uncomfortable or the strange. The German word unheimlich, meaning unhomelike, best captures the eerie feeling of the uncanny, the sense of the ordinary being "off"...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Gothic literature is defined by its use of dark scenery, melodrama, mystery, horror, and a fear of the unknown. Often there are terrible secrets, haunted houses, or dark, mysterious characters....
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Critic G. R. Thomson is widely quoted for having called "Usher" a "masterpiece of dramatic irony." Dramatic irony means that the audience is more aware of what will happen in a story than some of...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Roderick Usher's observation of "the sentience of all vegetable things" extends to his conviction that even inorganic things, such as the stones of his mansion, take on a certain consciousness of...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" recounts the story of its narrator's visit to the secluded estate of his boyhood friend Roderick Usher. While describing his initial knowledge of the estate,...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The name "Usher" is very significant in Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher." An usher is a doorkeeper, or someone who leads one to where one belongs. The main character...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Poe's Gothic tale of dualities is rife with ominous happenings, decay, darkness, and foreboding. The use of alliteration with /d/ in the opening sentence--"dull, dark, and soundless day"--generates...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
There are not many strong links or similarities between The Fall of the House of Usher and The Oblong Box, but there are a few weaker ones. For instance, both are about the death of a woman, though...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
In the very long opening paragraph to The Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator experiences darkness, depression, and dread as he draws closer and closer to the house of his old friend. The...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The exact diagnosis of Roderick Usher's affliction is unknown, but there is much evidence to say that at least one of his problems is grief. The narrator provides some of the afflictions of the...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Idealism of self basically means that you only see the good in yourself - there is no bad - and that is not present in The Fall of the House of Usher. At the beginning of the work, there is not...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" evokes many feelings, most of which can be grouped under the general category of "terror" or "horror." In the story, Poe focuses on a...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Understanding what Roderick represents in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a subjective exercise at best, based upon perceptions of readers and literary critics, for no one has the ability...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The weather begins to build towards a storm as the narrator lies sleepless and scared in his bedroom, where: "The dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" remains unnamed throughout the entire story, but he tells us at the beginning that he had once been a very good friend to Roderick Usher when they...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
It is really at the beginning of the story that Poe sets up the mood of the story through descriptions of the weather and what the narrator sees as he approaches the house. Descriptions of the...
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The Minister's Black Veil
Both of the short stories "The Minister's Black Veil," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and "The Fall of the House of Usher," by Edgar Allan Poe, deal with the theme of the evil of human nature. However,...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher serves, as narrators always do, the important role of observer. In Poe's story, however, the narrator's role is...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
It's not so much that Roderick Usher exhibits female characteristics, as the question suggests, but rather that he is an eccentric, isolated soul who may or may not have engaged in an incestuous...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Setting is a crucial element of Gothic fiction such as Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper". Much of the atmosphere of horror in...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Without doubt, the setting of Poe's Gothic masterpiece contributes greatly to the atmosphere of isolation, mystery, shadows, decay, and preternatural experiences. That the house is representative...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The previous answer repeatedly refers to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher as a poem; it is, in fact, a short story punctuated by a poem previously written by Poe, the text of...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
"From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast," the narrator declares after the harrowing scene of the enshrouded Madeline Usher, whose white cerements are blood-stained, displaying the...
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Edgar Allan Poe
Without doubt, there has been much debate on the interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as to whether it is a tale of natural or psychological forces acting together,...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
In his essay ¨The Importance of the Single Effect in a Prose Tale,¨ Poe contends that without ...a certain continuity of effort--without a certain duration or repetition of purpose--the soul is...
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Ligeia
This strategy used by Poe has the effect of making us, the readers, lose our bearings somewhat. We are from the first drawn into the intense world of Poe’s narrator – and as it is a...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
These two stories make for an interesting comparison. They were both written in the same literary period, the early nineteenth century, with the Irving tale preceding Poe’s only by some fifteen...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
American Gothic short stories can be said to have formed a distinctive American literary tradition because, while sharing obvious affinities with the European traditions, they also drew on specific...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The narrator does not succeed at all in his purpose in visiting Usher. He goes there with the intention of trying to bring Roderick Usher out of the severe depression into which he has fallen....
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story The Fall of the House of Usher is replete with indications of horrific events to come. Putting aside the fact that any story or poem preceded by the byline...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The short story begins with an epigraph in French, "Son coeur est un luth suspendu". This is taken from the work of the popular poet and songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger (1780 – 1857) who was...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
What is important to realise in this excellent gothic short story is that the setting and the location of the ill-fated House of Usher relates precisely to the characters who dwell within it, and...
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The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe’s short life bequeathed mankind the material for a fascinating discussion of a writer whose death at the age of 39 was thematically consistent with the body of work he left...