In Poe's 'The Fall Of The House Of Usher' By Edgar Allan Poe

The literary works of Edgar Allan Poe often focus on characters that suffer from some form of mental or physical illness. In his poems and short stories, Poe uses repetition and extensive description to create a relevant atmosphere for the reader. This is especially evident in Poe 's “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Using a narrator to provide an account through a first person perspective, Poe tells a story of two friends whose sanity becomes exceedingly more questionable as the story continues. An unnamed narrator is visiting a friend, Roderick Usher, who summoned him to his home. Usher is in failing health and has requested help from the narrator. As he tells the story, Poe creates a sense of fear and uneasiness through his descriptions of the home, Usher’s behavior, and the degrading mental status of Roderick Usher, his sister Madeline Usher, and the narrator. As “The Fall of the House of Usher” opens, Poe provides the reader a detailed description of the house and environment in which it resides. The narrator describes the scene as …show more content…
He is described as having a “ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye” (Poe 894). The earliest usage of the word “miraculous” references the idea that some things are not “explicable by natural laws” (OED 1) and must occur due to supernatural or godly intervention. Later usage of the term was applied to the actions of someone under significant influence of alcohol. Likewise, Poe describes Usher 's voice in the next paragraph as resembling that of a “lost drunkard” (Poe 894). Using this meaning, Usher 's depressed mood, glazed eyes, guttural speech, and loss of mental clarity could all be attributed to heavy alcohol consumption rather than an apparent descent into insanity. This is unlikely, as the usage of the word “miraculous” in this manner didn 't appear until several decades after Poe published “The Fall of the House of