The Haunted House Mystery

In the short story The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe uses suspense, symbolism, imagery, personification, and cliff hangers not only to make it scary in nature but to leave the reader or audience at its feet begging for more interesting and unsuspected events to happen.

Poe does and excellent job with using imagery and symbolism to describe Roderick Usher’s house as a place contained with frightening fear and undiscovered treachery.  Through out the story, dilapidated walls, enormous cracks, tarnished roof tops, and hovering darkness are Edgar Allen Poe’s descriptions of the house and its surrounding area that imply how old and corrupted the house is inside and out. The house is also symbolized to be an huge branched out tree that describe Roderick and Madeline Usher’s family tree which has been manipulated and basically destroyed by the cause of internal family incest.

Poe also uses suspense effectively to help identify the true haunting of the house. In the story, Poe describes how Madeline has suffered from a severe disease but doesn’t describe the cause of the disease which happened to occur from the incest in the Usher’s family. Madeline soon dies but then mysteriously rises from the afterlife in the middle of the story in order to seek revengeful homicide on her brother Roderick Usher and just like the effect from the corruption of the family tree, the house eventually crumbles to ashes with Madeline and Roderick Usher in it.

In my own short story I definitely use Poe’s same concept of undiscovered mystery in order to keep the reader one step behind the story because it causes the reader to become paranoid and unaware of what could happen next. I also would use Poe’s way of keeping the resolution to the story open with cliff hangers because its forces the reader to imagine what will happen next based on their personal interpretation.

One technique I would use differently in my own writing would be to insert clues that would seem obvious to the reader in order for them to predict an unlikely end result that they would believe is very likely to happen. A second literature technique I would use differently would be to use multiple types of figurative language to slowly shift the story into something completely different than what happened in the introduction.