This makes the strange situation nothing short of nightmarish for our narrator because it is a twisted version of reality.īut, this is Poe, it could only get worse. As Freud would say, there is something familiar at the heart of the unfamiliar. Here is Usher, but he is not Usher as he was meant to be in the eyes of the narrator.
This makes the situation uncanny and perverse. They are the last surviving members of their line and oddly, when considering the narrator’s claim of close friendship with Usher, he is surprised to learn of the existence of Usher’s ailing sister. The light has gone from him he has become an embodiment of the gothic landscape. He has become one with the darkness, his home and his bleak existence. He is not how he remembered him to be he has become cadaverous and worn. The narrator doesn’t recognise his friend.
“He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses the most insipid food was alone endurable he could wear only garments of certain texture the odours of all flowers were oppressive his eyes were tortured by even a faint light and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.” Even the master of the house has begun to embody the setting. Either way, the whole scene has an air of creepiness and depravation. The house is at the centre, and appears to have absorbed the darkness or, perhaps, it is the heart of the darkness that has spread outwards. He witnesses decay, ruin and spreading bleakness. It is a reflection of the surrounding area that the narrator has travelled through. The tale begins with the narrator visiting a haunted house it is old, grand and evil. It has all the classic elements of the genre.
This story, here, is the perfect gothic horror. His writing is fantastical and sordidly beautiful. The man describes the gothic in such a sublime way that I find myself drifting in a dream like world. Edgar Allan Poe takes a canvas and paints it black he takes a story and makes it dark and shadowy he takes a normal world and twists it to the point of corruption.
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