We learn, too, that his twin sister, Madeline, a neurasthenic woman like her brother, is subject to catatonic trances. His cadaverous appearance, his nervousness, his mood swings, his almost extrahuman sensitivity to touch, sound, taste, smell, and light, along with the narrator’s report that he seems lacking in moral sense, portrays a deeply troubled soul. With him we encounter Roderick Usher, who has changed drastically since last the narrator saw him. With this foreboding introduction, we enter the interior through a Gothic portal with the narrator. Very soon we understand that, whatever else it may mean, the house is a metaphor for the Usher family itself and that if the house is seriously flawed, so are its occupants. We share the narrator’s responses to the gloomy mood and the menacing facade of the House of Usher, noticing, with him, the dank lake that reflects the house (effectively doubling it, like the Usher twins we will soon meet) and apprehensively viewing the fissure, or crack, in the wall. This traveler, also the first-person narrator and boyhood friend of Roderick Usher, the owner of the house, has arrived in response to a summons from Usher. On a stormy autumn (with an implied pun on the word fall?) evening, a traveler-an outsider, like the reader-rides up to the Usher mansion. Poe’s narrative technique draws us immediately into the tale. Whatever conclusion a reader reaches, none finds the story an easy one to forget. Indeed, despite Poe’s distaste for Allegory, some critics view the house as a Metaphor for the human psyche (Strandberg 705). These explanations range from the pre-Freudian to the pre–Waste Land and pre-Kafka-cum-nihilist to the biographical and the cultural. The story has a tantalizingly horrific appeal, and since its publication in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, scholars, critics, and general readers continue to grapple with the myriad possible reasons for the story’s hold on the human psyche. Long considered Edgar Allan Poe‘s masterpiece, “The Fall of the House of Usher” continues to intrigue new generations of readers. Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
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