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Fall of House of Usher

In: English and Literature

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Reading Response: “The Fall of the House of Usher” In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the narrator is an unnamed character that visits a childhood friend, Roderick Usher, at his great mansion. The narrator describes in great detail the nature of the mansion that Usher lives in. In the first paragraph, the descriptive imagery that Poe uses—“the simple landscape features of the domain --upon the bleak walls --upon the vacant eye-like windows --upon a few rank sedges --and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees”—allows the reader to see everything in the narrator’s point of view. However, one must wonder who this narrator truly is. He does not reveal anything about himself to us throughout the entire prose, and although he notes that he was one of Usher’s close boyhood friends, he does not reveal anything else. He was asked to come visit Usher; when he mentions this fact to us, he sounds as if he wants to justify his coming to the house in the first place for he mentions that Usher wrote the letter with such earnestness—“it the apparent heart that went with his request”—that of course, he had to come. I found this segment a bit odd because here, I thought that the narrator was trying to justify this action to himself more than the readers; I thought it seemed as if he wasn’t sure why he had really agreed to visit Usher. In addition, one particular thing I noticed throughout this prose was the narrator’s apparent repetition of notifying the reader that he couldn’t possibly describe to us the odd things that happened during his stay at the House of Usher. He repeated this statement countless times in differently worded phrases: “in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated,” “I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion.” Although I can’t

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