USHER
...s still undertaking the care of his twin sister Madeline, who was apparently inflicted with some sort of catalepsy. The narrator arrives at the House for the sole purpose of alleviating Roderick’s infirmity with “the cheerfulness of [his] society” (Poe 15). He does not, however, grasp exactly how far Roderick’s illness has permeated into every aspect of his life. Roderick’s medical condition had become his world. He suffered from a peculiar exaggeration of his senses that had rendered him homebound. Any extreme in perception was utterly unbearable for Usher. His sister’s disorder was equally mysterious. Her body was wasting away, apparently without cause, and her catalepsy had taken over her countenance. Mistakenly, Roderick perceives his sister’s catalepsy for death, and this provokes him to entomb her in a vault in their mansion. Madeline is, however, far from deceased. She struggles vehemently to escape from her premature coffin. As Madeline’s struggles cause her condition to progress, Roderick also falls deeper into his mental sickness. Poe writes, “ And now, some days of bitter grief having passed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished” (Poe 24). Roderick was irreparably altered; while Madeline began to lose the battle for her physical life, Roderick also fought a losing battle for his sanity. The House itself is not free from this struggle; as Madeline escapes from her tomb, the weather surrounding the House of Usher relentlessly pounds upon it. Yet another example of the parallel lives of the Ushers is their nearly simultaneous destruction. After Madeline manages to escape the donjon, she seeks out her twin brother. In a fit of rage, Madeline attacks Roderick and “in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse […]” (Poe 28). Bailey argues: […] countless critics have questioned the reliability of Poe’s narrator in “The Fall of the House of Usher”: is his apparently supernatural description of Madeline Usher’s return from the grave, with its absurd echoes of the interpolated “Mad Trist” of Sir Lancelot [sic] Canning, the self-serving product of guilt or terror? (Bailey 20) The echoes are, conversely, not absurd at all. The narrator is not absolutely unreliable in his observations; the House is genuinely reflecting the happenings within it. At this point so near the closing moments of the tale, the House is a perfect reflection of Madeline’s attempt to get revenge upon her brother for his misdeed. Petrified after Madeline and Roderick’s final encounter, the narrator flees from the House. Moments after his escape he turns only to witness “the mighty walls [of the House] rushing asunder […] and the deep and dank tarn at [his] feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘HOUSE OF USHER’” (Poe 29). Because Ma...