Roderick Usher

Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The “Fall of the House of Usher” was very captivating. Once I began reading the story I couldn’t put the book down till I was done. I believe the protagonist in the story was Roderick Usher. I always assumed a protagonist to be heroic in some way. Roderick Usher’s character, however, was not heroic. Usher was not only a hypochondriac, but he was a mentally and physically sick man. I have no doubt that a lot of his mental and physical maladies sprouted from years of inbreeding in his family: I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, …show more content…
At this point the reader learned something strange about the relationship between the narrator and Roderick. Even though the two were childhood friends, the narrator never really knew Roderick that well. Throughout the story he mentions that Roderick and Madeline have features that are identical; it is not till she was being buried that the narrator learned that brother and sister are twins, “Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them” (1839, p. …show more content…
Roderick becomes overtaken with madness and Poe surprises us with his climax, Madeline bursting through the door tattered, bloody and alive. This led right into the falling action, the death of Roderick and our narrator fleeing in fear. The best part of the story for me was the denouement; the house crumbles and dies with Madeline and Roderick. This led me to think of the several themes I found throughout the story. The first theme was madness. This theme continued to evolve throughout the story, not just with Roderick but with our narrator as well. The next was identity. It appears Roderick and Madeline were each other. They were created together, born together and eventually died together. Neither character ever got to have his or her own lives as they were prisoners of their family and their house. The last theme that I found was the characters being trapped. Roderick and Madeline were trapped in each other; they were trapped in their house, Roderick was trapped in his own head; Madeline was trapped in a tomb; and in the end, they both died trapped in the house they never left. . In the end, I found the title of this story itself to be ironic. According to the Oxford Dictionary, when used as a verb, usher can mean “cause or mark the start of something new” (2014). Madeline and Roderick dying ended their bloodline and allows that land to begin anew. The title gives the reader