The Reasons Behind My Creation

I, Edgar Allan Poe, write dark and suspenseful short stories with a mysterious twist. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of my famous short stories; it is a tale about a visitor meeting his sick friend, Roderick. The story revolves around paranoia and fear that Roderick experiences as he and his twin sister, Madeline, suffer from a mysterious connection to their family’s mansion. I wrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” to create a suspenseful story by revealing the physical and mental relation between the Usher family and the mansion through descriptions of the setting and Roderick’s state of mind. 

I personified the house to reflect the Ushers’ sorrow and dismay. I made the narrator look “upon the scene before [him]--upon the mere house” and “the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows” that possess “an utter depression of soul which he can compare to no earthly sensation” to reveal the Ushers’ suffering (Poe 412). This personification reveals the fear and decay that consume both Roderick and Madeline as they reside in the mansion. Their home mirrors their mental collapse, revealing the relationship between the family’s emotional state and the decaying mansion by displaying that the house is not only a setting but also acts as a symbol of the Usher family’s psychological decline. My decisions were influenced by the goal of making the story more suspenseful by displaying the mysterious connection between the mansion and the Ushers. Although the physical setting significantly contributed to the story’s suspense, Roderick’s mental state also impacted the mood of this tale.

I included Roderick’s extreme sensitivities to reveal his connection to the mansion. The narrator went to visit his sick childhood friend and saw that “[h]e suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses,” emphasizing the fragility of his mind and the contribution of his paranoia to the increasing suspense of the story (Poe 417). The house’s physical state reflects Roderick’s emotional condition of decay. Roderick’s sensitive senses further emphasize the connection between the Ushers’ mind and their decomposing environment. Their mysterious link creates suspense as the story progresses until Roderick and Madeline’s inevitable death. 

I used the crack in the house to symbolize the family’s weakness and their eventual collapse. I described the crack as “a barely perceptible fissure” that came down from the building’s roof “in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” to symbolize the slow decay of the Usher twins (Poe 415). The crack in the house symbolizes the house’s downfall, along with its members. I connected the physical house to the family’s deterioration to reveal that the Ushers and the house are linked. This physical feature of the house reflects Roderick’s decay, and this relation between the house and Roderick’s mind makes the story thrilling.

I created the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” because I wanted to write a dramatized story by displaying the connection between the Ushers’ physical and mental state and their mansion through the setting, Roderick’s sensitivity, and the symbolism of the crack in the mansion. I achieved this by personifying the setting, which is the mansion, to create suspense by revealing the link between the deteriorating states of the house and the Ushers. I also emphasized Roderick’s sensitive senses to display the fragility of his mind, connecting it to the decaying mansion. I created suspense through the symbolism of the crack in the mansion, which reflects the slow, eventual collapse of the Ushers. I wrote this story to create a dark, suspenseful short story of a visitor meeting his sick friend in a mysterious house.  

Work Cited

Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher. Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 12 Dec. 2016.