USHER

This story written by Edgar Allan Poe is about a narrator who receives and letter from an old friend and goes to visit him upon his request. Roderick Usher is the mans old friend and they have not seen each other since childhood but the narrator feels compelled to see him anyways. Once he gets to the house which he observes is a massive mansion of a family estate he notices that it is very gloomy and the walls on the exterior are crumbling and fungi covered the mansion as well. Once inside the two men talk and the narrator notices there is something off about his old friend. He remembers him being weird in childhood but not to the extent that he is now. "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 odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.(665)" This is when we learn that Usher is mentally ill and disturbed and he also says he must die in the house because if not he will be lost. What Usher's biggest problem is that he suffers from fear of everything and the future. To me its obvious that Usher has severe anxiety issues and well as many other physiological illnesses that would have been better had he been treated. He might even have suffered from hysteria that doctors claimed women suffered from at the time. But Usher gives reasoning as to why he might be suffering and that is because his twin sister just died and she was his life long companion. Both of the men put his sister Madeline in a coffin and bury her in a tomb under the mansion. Over the course of the story the narrator and Usher partake in many different activities such as reading books and reviewing art as well as painting together and the narrator seems to be affected by the oddness of the house. At the end of the story the narrator can't sleep and is up in the middle of the night and Usher comes into his room with a lamp. Usher also can't sleep and the narrator reads to him a story and as he is reading he keeps hearing loud screams. He doesn't want to freak Usher out so he says nothing but hears the screams again. And then the insanity of his friend bleeds over into the narrator. "...but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.(674)"The narrator is so shocked at what he is seeing that he leaves the estate immediately. The whole story is about mental illness and i believe after staying in the house for over a week affected the narrators psyche in some way. 

-Sam