A Comparison of Poe and Roderick, The Fall of the House of Usher

A detailed Summary of A Comparison of Poe and Roderick, The Fall of the House of Usher

Reading "The Fall of the House of Usher", one may readily see the similarities of character between Roderick Usher, the main character in the story, and of Edgar Allan Poe, the author. To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. 'I shall perish,' said he, 'I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus. . . shall I be lost. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial incident. . . this intolerble agitation of soul. . . In this unnerved--in this pitiable condition, I feel that I must inevitable abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.' (Poe 704) If one would attempt to examine the character of Roderick Usher alon with that of Edgar Allan Poe, one owuld see the above description of Usher is so much like Griswold's similar description below of Poe's individual makeup: He was at all times a dreamer. . . in heaven or hell--peopled with the creatures and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses. . . eyesupturned in passionate prayer (never for himself, for he felt. . . that he was already damned). (Griswold 141) Poe was a multifaceted individual. Having gone through a tragic childhood,

Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Griswald, Rufus Wilmot. "Edgar Allan Poe." Moulton's Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors. Ed. Martin Tucker. New York: Frederick Unger, 1978. 141-142. Howarth, William L., ed. The Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Lawrence, David Herbert. Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsa House, 1985. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Ed. R.V. Cassill. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. 700-715. Wilbur, Richard. "The House of Poe." Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Laruie Lanzen Harris. Michigan: Gale Research, 1981. 522-523.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold, ed. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Chelsa House, 1985.

he never seemed to grasp onto reality or to his identity. With the abandonment by his father, the death of his mother, and the placement into a home where he was never legally adopted, Poe's inadequacies emerged. With this shakey foundation, the future writer's outlook on life was bleak and dreary (Bloom 141). Harold Bloom states that, "Poe's genius was for negative and opposition" (11). Vincent Buranelli describes him also: "Edgar Allan Poe is the most complex personality in the gallery of American authors. No one else stands at the center of a mystery so profound" (19). The style of writing that Poe so often presents is indcative to the insight into the emotional and spiritual r

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