The Fall Of The House Of Usher Essay

Words: 484
Pages: 2

Imagination Over Reason
All people can relate to feeling anxious. Anxiety is not planned, it happens at any time to any person. Anxiety can be the result of many things like job interviews, going to school or even things that seem simple like speaking to people. In the short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," the author uses the power of anxiety to draw emotion from readers for characters. He does this by vividly describing the setting, creating abnormal characters, and using intense dialogue. These all relate to how and when imagination overcomes reason.
To begin, in the first paragraph of the book the author describes, by using personification, the setting of the house. The windows in particular are described as "eye-like." (Poe 1). This infers that, just as the narrator is watching the house, the house is watching him. At the beginning of the story, before readers are even properly introduced to the narrator, we are already concerned with his well-being. To find windows scary, often times, is unrealistic. In this case, the windows are described so well that imagination begins to overcome reason. As one should know, there is no logical explanation as to how a
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(Poe 2). Readers are also informed that Roderick has a twin sister, Madeline. In the story it is inferred that the whatever happens to the twins, happens to the Usher house. The abnormality comes with Roderick's unnamed mental illness and the fact that the twins and the house are somehow linked so that they display each others physical characteristics. Imagination overcomes reason in this scenario because after understanding these details, readers begin to fear real-everyday-life things that might even be considered common such as mental illnesses, twins being linked biologically and houses decaying from the inside