The Fall Of The House Of Usher And Other Tales (1998) - Plot & Excerpts
Edgar Allan Poe has succeeded in creating an extremely excellent Gothic work, which contains the famous characteristics of this genre, such as terror, suspense, depressing landscape, haunted house and gloom’s metonymy. A dearth of setting is the first and clear observation that we have in mind. In other words, when this story begins, it states just an unnamed narrator standing in front of a gloomy and frightening house on an autumnal and overcast day. Therefore, neither a location nor a precise time is mentioned. However, the lack of the place and time does not mean that the short story’s setting is trifling; when we consider here the atmosphere, which is extremely more important and influential than time and space, we can evidently understand that it plays an amazingly significant role in building a quintessential setting. The narrator is our means of describing the house from outside and inside. We, via the narrator, can feel or get involved in a very gloomy and unappealing day, let alone the horrifying house of Usher that render the narrator, as well as us, terrified. Inside the mansion, we obviously note that the indoor objects bring again those uncanny feelings, which indicate that he has entered a world of mysteries and suspense. Furthermore, the dull day, which is inevitably considered a symbol of dark and gloom, transfers to the reader that indeed it is not a sunny day in which regular and usual events are expected. In this story, what will later on happen is foreshadowed by those features of the environment of the house of Usher; that is, when the dull day, the eerie feelings or the mansion’s description is seen as the first glimpse, we automatically grasp that there will come events that can not be scientifically or logically explained. The fact that Roderick Usher has not left his house for many years clearly shows the state of claustrophobia, concretely and mainly the house, from which Roderick can never escape “for many years, he had never ventured forth.” In addition, the narrator also does not seem to leave the house, and hence he and we are trapped in that evil house until the end of the story. Any house, as everybody normally knows, is considered as both building and family line. The house of Usher, however, is not merely a structural design, but it is a living thing that is part of Roderick Usher. The house is alive because it renders its inhabitants gloomy and miserable. This is what happens to the narrator when he stands before the mansion. Moreover, the uncanny sounds that both Roderick and the narrator hear evidently indicate that the house is trying to terrify them—which indeed it does succeed in doing so. When the writer chooses “The Fall of the house of Usher” as his official title, it is quiet comprehensible that he is talking about the collapse of the house as a building, and yet we have to peer into another important meaning which might be the decay of Usher family, as well. This could be nonsense, but if we go back to the Eighteenth Century, the term “house” was referred to both building and family. Therefore, we witness a dual “fall” of the house being inanimate and animate.Having mentioned the narrator, we have to consider his role which amazingly contributes to the report of the whole events. Apparently, the narrator is unnamed, and it seems that his name is not important as his duty, which is primarily to narrate. Thus, we accompany him, and he guides us through the house and its weird events of which even the narrator has not been sensible. Furthermore, he does not seem to be engaged in the Usher life, for throughout the story nothing horrible happens to him. And this is obviously viewed when Madeline Usher neglects the narrator’s presence the moment she attacks her brother, Roderick.Roderick Usher suffers from an extremely bizarre and serious illness. The former directly informs us about his physical and psychological complication. And it is very evident that more or less any illness has a remedy, especially a physical one. Nonetheless, his problem, which has always been great to endure, is prominently mental, and hence he has sent his only friend a letter in which he displays his absolute need for the narrator’s presence. Although needing help of a friend is a normal thing, it seems to add a sense of curiosity and lets us question the reason why Roderick chooses that specific time—not before—to be called on by the narrator. Roderick invites the latter and us, as readers, in order to demonstrate either the eerie events that happen in the house or to make us fill his emptiness and solitude; both assumptions might be definitely true. Not only does Edgar Allan Poe succeed in making us merely his tales’ loyal readers, but also he enters us in an amazingly different world which we will totally experience without being physically involved. According to this tale, terror leads to madness and death. The most horrible thing that Roderick fears is his own fear of death. In other words, we observe here a man who probably has the ability to foresee (or at least to predict) what will happen to him—which primarily has to be a tragic death due to fear “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.” This becomes evident when Madeline Usher throws herself on Roderick. We might conclude that Madeline is just an embodiment of fear and that she might not even exist from the beginning, for she neglects the narrator two times: when she walks in a distant place of the house and when she falls upon her brother.Though art, in this tale, is not very essential for some readers, it might be one of the hidden, and supreme, messages that Edgar Allan Poe wanted to transfer. Roderick Usher lives indeed an amazingly miserable life; however, we assume that the possession of different literature books and musical instruments is an ample testimony to say that he is an intellectual person in spite of his isolation from society. And this automatically indicates that Poe implicitly claims the fact that, in this world, there are masterminds who can help, somehow, humanity, and yet they are neglected or are completely forgotten even after their death. In addition, we also learn, too, the very remarkable fact, that the previous members of Usher family died from almost the same obscure illness that Roderick and Madeline have; therefore, we witness a family that has an inheritable disease, which was also the case with Edgar Allan Poe whose wife, Virginia, died of tuberculosis as also had many members of his family. Roderick (who identically represents Poe) crazily adores Madeline as his sister and incestuous companion. If we study Poe’s love life, we will absolutely notice that both he and Virginia, who was very young, had a brother-sister and husband-wife relationship. “The Fall of the House of Usher” evidently indicates that Roderick Usher’s fictional life is, somehow or other, an identical mirror of Poe’s.Roderick Usher’s fear is inevitably driving him to madness and eventually to a tragic death. We clearly witness a life of a sick man in the mercy of fear and agitation. He does not know what he wants and what to do. Nevertheless, if we dig deep into the real facts, we will absolutely say that he proudly has the right to be thought a mad man, because he can neither believe the eerie phenomena that regularly happen in the mansion nor his sister’s revival. In other words, he is not crazy, for his house is pervasively haunted, and his sister actually gets back from the after life. If we were to imagine ourselves in that mansion, we would probably be called also mad “He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.” This quotation implicitly indicates that the sense which does not allow him to eat, wear, see and hear properly is the same sense which hints that Madeline will indeed come back.Through Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, we, as his readers and witnesses, obviously notice his own fear, madness and miserable life, as well as his utmost physical and psychological illness. This story is a real success, for it is widely open to thousands of interpretations which are mainly within the frame of Gothic elements, such as melancholy, mystery, fear and gloomy atmosphere that make the reader cling more and more to his tales which probably will always be traced in one’s mind.
Inspired MadnessA Book Review of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and Other TalesThere’s no denying that much of modern horror fiction — as we know it anyway — grew out of the gloomy, chaotic depth of the 19th century when a few demented souls were churning out tales of things that go bump in the night. These were writers who were dubbed freaks during their time and, as if the patina of age hasn’t wore off, are still considered as such today. They broke taboos, infringed established rules, attacked the sensibilities of their era, and twisted genres to the breaking point. Sure thing, they died broke, scorned or both, yet in the process gave birth to some of the great works of literature, became a pioneer and initiated many of the conventions that are now considered commonplace in much of today’s horror fiction.Thus, in my exploration (and bid to become the most annoying know-it-all) in matters concerning the horror genre, I looked back and was lead on this dark alleyway, in the hall of one of the most venerable Old Masters of Horror: Edgar Allan Poe.Looking at Poe’s life, one gets a fair idea that the man led a tragic, if not a horrific life. He was a poet at heart, aching for personal losses and hopping from job to job in the publishing world while he tried to find something fulfilling amid alcoholism and depression. To help pay the bills, like so many writers before and after him, he turned to sensationalism.Lucky for us, he was good at it, and the results were among the most vivid and chilling horror tales ever written. You’ve got your buried alive tale (The Premature Burial), your revenge tale (The Cask of Amontillado), your torture tale (The Pit and the Pendulum), your plague tale (The Masque of the Red Death), your haunted house tale (The Fall of the House of Usher) and perhaps the most vivid of all, the internalized ghost story (The Tell-Tale Heart). It is the last of these that always struck me as the most effective, at least among Poe’s work. All of these stories are important to the genre. Many of them are flat out revolutionary, and have been imitated ever since.But there’s something about The Tell-Tale Heart, on the relentless psychological hell it seems to hurl into the reader’s head, that makes it stand out as a masterwork among masterworks. It speaks to the fear that we might lose control of the one thing we always thought we could manage: ourselves. We all have our own little bodies under the floorboards, and even if we’re not murderers, it’s a story that suggests we could be — which, in my opinion, might be among the scariest feelings of all. Poe was a master at conveying this kind of internal torture, and for all the unapologetic sensationalism of his work, it’s that internalized agony that makes it all too real for us.The reader of an Edgar Allan Poe story — we could also throw in his splendid poems, I presume — may expect to encounter characters in the grip of extreme experience. Murder is common, as is madness, and life at times can seem a horror. Reading his stories is a retreat from humanity into a ghastly realm where as much as possible of the human is left out, where our weaknesses became wobbling strengths and our trembling gasping cries. But what we forever owe to Poe is he dared to look, when others have no guts even to take peek, at the door where horror lurks opening a worm of possibilities that slithered in and out of the genre to which he may have the (bloody?) hand of creating. More than anything else, it is Poe who sculpted, with such fine craftsmanship, a form out of our very own fears and nightmares._________________________Book Details:Published by Signet Classics(Mass Market Paperback, 1980 Edition)383 pagesStarted: October 6, 2010Finished: October 23, 2010My Rating: ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
What do You think about The Fall Of The House Of Usher And Other Tales (1998)?
second novel ever read....Mr Graffia's follow up to the success of The Hobbit during first half of 7th grade at St. Gen's on the northwest side. the price on the cover of my original Signet Classic copy is 60c. and it's pretty beat up, but still serviceable. Poe is outstanding....pretty heady stuff for tween in the early 70's!ironically, the raven is not among the stories of this collection, which prohibits the use of stock nevermore quips.the tell-tale heart, certainly a classic, one of my faves and inspiration for Bill Cosby?
—Mike
This is my favorite of all Poe's stories. (Which considering my love for him, was not an easy choice to make.) I have read it several times over, numerous times out-loud and in scary voices to entertain my little brother :). It's incredible how Poe can write in this helter skelter fashion so that you really don't know exactly what's going on-- and then in one final paragraph, or even the final sentence, he brings it all together and has you so thoroughly creeped out and simultaneously blown your mind, you need to go back and re-read it immediately. He was an opium induced genius and no one can ever compare to his rhythmic, sing-song, and deliriously fluid writing.
—Melissa Jackson
While I don't like horror stories, and a lot of Poe's endings leave me unsatisfied, the range of his writings, the influence he had on later writers and the course of literature, and the story of his life are fascinating. I had not realized that he wrote more than horror and poems. My favorites in this book were:Introduction by Stephen MarloweThe Balloon-Hoax (From this you can tell Poe studied the physical sciences and mechanical technologies of his day. This is almost sci fi.)The Murders in the Rue MorgueThe Tell-Tale Heart (better than I remembered it -- it made me smile)The Narrative of A. Gordon PymAlthough many of Poe's short stories leave me flat, I do plan to search out several of his stories that are mentioned in the introduction but not included in the book. I also want to read "The Mystery of Marie Roget", which is the third of his stories with Auguste Dupin, who was introduced in The Murders in the Rue Morgue.Updates while reading:1. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue -- It's like Sherlock Holmes before there was Sherlock Holmes!"2. 68.0% t"I mostly don't care for the horror short stories, but some of Poe's other stuff is pretty cool. In the middle of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym right now -- a seafaring adventure story."3. 95.0% t"There are some outdated ideas about Antarctica in The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, but it is a good story overall."
—Sorento62
