"The Fall of the House of Usher"
A Short Story Analysis
(Salvo, Cherry Mae M.)
A way to look at The Fall of the House of Usher is as a powerful personal picture in which Poe himself is represented or reflected by Roderick Usher. Poe compresses things into a short narrative and fiddles with them, uncovering new psychological layers.
Therefore, a more viable explanation is that the "house of Usher" represents the mind, and this interpretation is likely the one that has gained the greatest support from detractors. Over fifty years after Poe finished writing, Sigmund Freud would do more than anyone else to distinguish between the conscious and unconscious mind's organizational principles, but he was not the first to propose that our conscious minds might conceal or even repress our unconscious feelings, fears, neuroses, and desires.
With this ominous preamble, the storyteller leads us through a Gothic doorway into the interior. We meet Roderick Usher with him, who has undergone a significant shift since the narrator last saw him. A severely tormented soul is depicted by his cadaverous look, anxiousness, mood swings, and nearly abnormal sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light. The narrator also notes that he lacks moral sensibility. We also discover that Madeline, his twin sister, is prone to catatonic trances and is also neurasthenic like her brother. Like the home, these two personalities have terrible, unfixable flaws. As we venture farther into the shadowy home and work with the narrator to understand Roderick's condition, the suspense increases.
A key part of the narrative is played by The House of Usher, a double meaning that refers to both the physical building and the family. It is the first "character" the narrator introduces to the reader and is given a humanized description: twice in the first paragraph, the windows are referred to as "eye living." The home "dies" alongside the two Usher brothers as a result of the fracture that forms on its side, which represents the decline of the Usher family. The poem "The Haunted Palace" by Roderick, which appears to be a direct allusion to the mansion that portends catastrophe, highlighted this relationship.
The psychological depths of this narrative may never be fully explored, but it raises a lot of difficult concerns and offers practically limitless possibilities for interpretation.
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