"...an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray walls, and the silent tarn, in the form of an inelastic vapor or gas -- dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued."
Internet Quotation: "...I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance." - Joseph W. Walker
Summary: The first quotation comes from the beginning of "The Fall of the House of Usher" when our unnamed narrator is giving us his vision of the eponymous house. The pervading sense of gloom in the story is first established with passages such as this one, and I feel that one of the best parts of this story -- and many of Poe's tales -- is the atmosphere that surrounds the action. It is very dark and very Gothic, and you are placed within the environment for the whole of the story. There are stories where the setting feels like merely a convention of storytelling; in Poe, the setting is integral to the story itself.
Joseph Walker's quotation, to one Dr. Snodgrass, is here mostly because I can't help but find a macabre hilarity in it. Looking at Poe's tumultuous life and his unsettling works, you can see that there was, indeed, something wrong with him that required attention. The quotation itself is from Poe's final days, when he was found by Walker in "great distress" on the streets of Baltimore. It is a sad thing that Poe was ultimately taken from this world in such ignominy, but perhaps it is a fitting end for the glum writer.
My Ideas: This story is archetypal Poe: Gothic, dark, gloomy, frightening, mysterious, creepy, eerie. It has everything you need in a piece of Gothic fiction, from the dilapidated antiquity of the mansion, to the crazed Roderick Usher, to the deadly climax. It makes for intense reading, which you sometimes don't get with the so-called canon. I'm glad professors somewhere have allowed it to stay within the confines of great American literature despite its place in what can be identified as the oft-maligned (in literature at least) genre-fiction.
My first thought about the story is just how scary it is. Reading doesn't usually hold the same visceral horror as, say, movies, mostly because of the distinct lack of sound. But that's where this story succeeds. The end of this tale revolves around sounds, first perceived as imagined but later explained by the deranged muttering of Roderick Usher. The brilliant telling gave me a start with each new sound: the cracking, the shrieking, the metallic reverberation. Poe injects a sonic dimension into what is essentially a silent medium. While we do read aloud on occasion and we have devices like onomatopoeia that can attempt to capture sound on a printed page, it doesn't always have as powerful of an effect as the sounds themselves. But through these precise, expertly written sounds that are described in the story, one can hear the noises, even when reading silently, that so alarm the narrator. (not to mention ourselves!) The horror of these sounds gives an almost overwhelming suspense that ultimately leads to the shocking reveal that Madeline Usher was buried alive.
The reason she was buried alive by her twin is something that is difficult to work out, given the nameless illness of Roderick and the scarcity of appearances by Madeline. The illness of Roderick Usher appears to stem from both his family line and the house itself. From his family there is a long tradition of direct ancestry, and Usher understands that his death will end the line. From this history stems a resignation to the family's fate: "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost." This raises questions about his illness. Is it actually real, or is he just giving into the precedent set by his family? Perhaps it is a little of both. His mental illness seems real, given the fact that he buried his sister alive and becomes increasingly unstable throughout the story. But I don't think it would have been quite so bad had his family not given him certain expectations, making him into the hypochondriac he is.
The house can't be helping him either. The big, dark mansion that stands near a decrepit tarn is, in Roderick's mind, alive. The "evidence of the sentience" is said to be the "the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls." The house itself is alive and acting upon Roderick's spirits, as it had his ancestors. It has become a part of him, a member of the family just like his sister. When the twins fall at the end, then, so must the house, fully terminating every remaining vestige of the Usher line. Usher's verses entitled "The Haunted Palace" weren't just thrown in for good measure.
That's where the real brilliance of the story comes from: its total connectedness. There isn't any dead weight in the story, no purposeless sentences. Poe's writing is calculated and directed, and it gives the story a pace and an atmosphere that makes for both an excellent piece of literature and a terrifying horror story. When, after you've read the last line, you go back and see all the interlocking connections coming together like so much brickwork, you begin to understand the mastery involved in this tale.
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