Edgar Allan Poe's Use of Narrative Strategy

The overall image is that of the chipper romanticistic/Gothic hero who is decked out in a cutaway and cloak and (of course) riding his horse in (more incisively through, by the time the story is complete) the coerce. But oh, what a storm it shall have been.

[W]hen I again uplifted my eyes to the field of operations itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I unless take note it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the solely mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their quick vicinity--an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued (Poe 5).

Focus on the surroundings and on the fabricator's experience of having tricks vie on his perception has the gear up of establishing his commonsense but hitherto melancholy turn of mind and convincing the reader that there is a morally dark quality to the (Gothic, of course) mansion. Equally, that focus has the effect of drawing the reader into the narrator's mind, further strengthening reader/narrator identification. It seems no accident, either, that the narrator is a bookish sort of a chap (so is the reader, who has after all taken t

he tale in hand), not infrequently sharing something of the content of what he reads.

The foreshadowing of horror, of course, does not rule out the narrator from explaining his efforts to put a rational construction on his experience. The manifest content of Usher's demeanor is his concern over his badly ill sister Madeleine and the prospect of his being the last survivor of the Usher line, but latent in that circumstance are the wretchedness and madness to which the family has apparently descended and upon which the final horror turns.

The narrator says he did not oppose Usher's burial plans for Madeleine because he did not consider them "unnatural" (Poe 10). However, the fact that he notices the "mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in expiry," typical of victims of catalepsy, along with Usher's revelation that he and Madeleine were twins and his "objectless" distractedness after her death, raises the reader's suspicion that the death was not dispositive, cathartic, or curative. Given the extremity and isolation of the environment of the mansion and grounds, it takes very little imagination for the reader to approve whether Roderick and Madeleine might have been lovers, thus profoundly profaning their relationship and the family, quite of merely cadaverous siblings. In other words, the reader begins to prevail horrors that are not even mentioned and that cannot be confirmed but knows that something more is to come.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher. Nevada City, Calif.: eBookMall, 2000.

If the narrator is bookish, melancholy, and redolent of the Romantic hero, Roderick Usher has raised such attributes to a high art. They dole out an interest in books and were boyhoo
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