the fall of the house of usher-is roderick insane-research paper due tomorrow-help me please!! i ll do anything!

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my research paper is on how poe terrorizes the reader through his bizarre treatment of setting and discription of insane characters- ive got most of it dowm straight but i need to convince my professor how roderick usher is frightfully insane by tomooro- can you somehow help me with two examples-i already have 2 -by tonight????? i owe you big if you can!!!!!!!!!-jenna

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2001

Answers

Decadent, dying, darkly romantic enough to drive beyond the brink? Did Usher die before flipping out or was the simple shock of all his fears realized too much for him? In the story and its mirror poem "The Haunted Palace" the theory, the synbolsim and the plot are united in uniting the house(building) to the House(family) and its personification in Roderick Usher himself. When he dies it all crashes in with him. The inner and outward rot, the complete unhealthiness and hovering on the verge of death just waiiting for some horrific disturbance, some climax is centered of course in the mind of the victrim. We are allowed just the brief(almost fatal) distance of having all this relayed through an intimate narrator who barely escapes.

As for examples, you didn't say which two you had! Usher's abstract art, divorced from the real world and liiving society? Usher's identification with the gothic story he is telling before his sister breaks in? His wild music? His obsession with death but simultaneous attempt to escape the death of his sister and his own death? The completely opposing tension and sense of impending doom plays throughout this typically claustrophobic trap.

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2001


madeline is the physical while roderick is the mental part of existance. The house symbolizes the existance of the usher family, so when roderick buries madeline alive, he is killing off the physical part of his exsistance. One part cannot live without the other so roderick goes insane and they both end up killing eachother. Once they are dead, the families existance is no more so the house itself crashes. His sanity lives and dies with the life and death of his sister

-- Anonymous, November 13, 2001

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