Beschreibung

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a shortstory by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in September 1839 inBurton's Gentleman's Magazine. It was slightly revised in 1840 forthe collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It containswithin it the poem "The Haunted Palace", which had earlier beenpublished separately in the April 1839 issue of the BaltimoreMuseum magazine.

Plot---------------------------------------

The tale opens with the unnamed narrator arriving at the houseof his boyhood friend, Roderick Usher, having received a letterfrom him in a distant part of the country complaining of an illnessand asking for his help. Although Poe wrote this short story beforethe invention of modern psychological science, Roderick's symptomscan be described according to its terminology. They includehyperesthesia (hypersensitivity to light, sounds, smells, andtastes), hypochondria (an excessive preoccupation or worry abouthaving a serious illness), and acute anxiety. It is revealed thatRoderick's twin sister, Madeline, is also ill and falls intocataleptic, death-like trances. The narrator is impressed withRoderick's paintings, and attempts to cheer him by reading with himand listening to his improvised musical compositions on the guitar.Roderick sings "The Haunted Palace", then tells the narrator thathe believes the house he lives in to be sentient, and that thissentience arises from the arrangement of the masonry and vegetationsurrounding it.
Roderick later informs the narrator that his sister has died andinsists that she be entombed for two weeks in a vault (family tomb)in the house before being permanently buried. The narrator helpsRoderick put the body in the tomb, and he notes that Madeline hasrosy cheeks, as some do after death. They inter her, but over thenext week both Roderick and the narrator find themselves becomingincreasingly agitated for no apparent reason. A storm begins.Roderick comes to the narrator's bedroom, which is situateddirectly above the vault, and throws open his window to the storm.He notices that the tarn surrounding the house seems to glow in thedark, as it glowed in Roderick Usher's paintings, although there isno lightning.
The narrator attempts to calm Roderick by reading aloud The MadTrist, a novel involving a knight named Ethelred who breaks into ahermit's dwelling in an attempt to escape an approaching storm,only to find a palace of gold guarded by a dragon. He also findshanging on the wall a shield of shining brass of which is written alegend: that the one who slays the dragon wins the shield. With astroke of his mace, Ethelred kills the dragon, who dies with apiercing shriek, and proceeds to take the shield, which falls tothe floor with an unnerving clatter.
As the narrator reads of the knight's forcible entry into thedwelling, cracking and ripping sounds are heard somewhere in thehouse. When the dragon is described as shrieking as it dies, ashriek is heard, again within the house. As he relates the shieldfalling from off the wall, a reverberation, metallic and hollow,can be heard. Roderick becomes increasingly hysterical, andeventually exclaims that these sounds are being made by his sister,who was in fact alive when she was entombed and that Roderick knewthat she was alive. The bedroom door is then blown open to revealMadeline standing there. She falls on her brother, and both land onthe floor as corpses. The narrator then flees the house, and, as hedoes so, notices a flash of light causing him to look back upon theHouse of Usher, in time to watch it break in two, the fragmentssinking into the tarn.

-From wikipedia-