Mrs. Spampinato
English III-6th period
4 December 2014
The End of a Noble Family
A man is riding his horse to find a mansion that an old friend of his lives in. When the man gets to the mansion he notices how old and how rundown it looks, he also finds his friend very ill inside. While in the house the man sees his friend’s sister reminding him of many years ago. Roderick the man’s friend reminded him of his sister and he explains how none of the doctors can figure out what is wrong with her. Then from all of her diseases she dies, and Roderick and the visitor build a coffin for her. One day while Roderick is reading the man a book, the man hears sounds around the mansion, when he goes to check them out Roderick’s sister appears and kills Roderick. During all of this commotion the man runs out of the mansion, not believing what he just witnessed. In “The fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe shows the family in a state of decay.
When the story begins, Poe shows a family in a state of decay through imagery, Roderick, and his Mansion. For example, in the fall of the house of Usher, the narrator describes the house as, “Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves” (Poe 415). When the narrator gets to the house he describes the house in a very descriptive way, talking about the color of the bricks, the fungus overspreading the whole …show more content…
In the beginning of the story, Poe uses imagery of the mansion to emphasize how aged everything has started to get and how it is slowly deaerating away. Later in the story, Poe uses characterization to describe the state of which Roderick is in and foreshadowing to show what will come later in the story. Lastly, Poe uses flashbacks to show the state of which his sister Madeline was in. Poe’s keen use of these literary devices emulates that the family is in a state of