Isolation In The House Of Usher

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Edgar Allan Poe can be described as the most literate madman to ever live. As a boy, he took an interest in poetry, and as he cultivated his poetic abilities, he wrote more short stories with as much of a deeper meaning as his poems. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe uses tone, repetition, and imagery to show that isolation is the ultimate cause of demise. Poe consistently employs a less-than-conversational variety of words, and chooses them with aplomb. With his vocabulary words, he uses a negative tone to tell the reader how he feels. “He suffered from much from a morbid acuteness of the senses;...the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light.” In this passage, the narrator describes Roderick, …show more content…
Later, toward the end of the story, the narrator says he “saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur,...bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.” Poe uses a more hurried, yet still dark, tone of voice to describe the fact that Roderick has gone completely mad. The reader can see the point at which Roderick’s insanity culminated, and Poe’s tone insists that he flew over the cuckoo’s due to his solitude. While Poe is a thesaurus master, he also uses the technique of repetition throughout The Fall of the House of Usher to establish checkpoints on how the scene changes. His constant tab on how Roderick’s countenance looks makes the reader have to guess how Roderick feels and what he is thinking. Poe’s repetition of facial description connects with the theme that isolation leads to one’s destruction because as the story progresses, Roderick’s visage becomes less natural and more insane. Poe also keeps tabs on the atmosphere. This repetition symbolizes that Roderick has nothing left to think about, so he cycles through his other thoughts. This shows that all the time he has spent isolated reduced him to
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