He initially dismisses the supernatural rather easily after first trying to explain "the insufferable gloom" (843) he feels when he first approaches the House of Usher. He pauses and thinks about what he is seeing, how it makes him feel, and why. All he can come up with is the "unsatisfactory conclusion" (843) that there is some power in the arrangements of natural objects that can cause such feelings. He dismisses this power as "beyond our depth." (844) Later on he begins having a gradually harder time dismissing what he experiences. .
He begins to no longer simply pass off what he can't explain, but actually to try to make himself believe it is in some way not unnatural. This starts when at one point he is looking up at the house itself and imagines it to be in an atmosphere all its own with a hellish gas surrounding it. To pass this off he tells himself it "must have been a dream." (845) As he settles into his temporary residency, he finds he has to dismiss more and more odd occurrences. Walking through the eerie halls of the house, he "still [wonders]" (845) how the eerie feeling is justified. When he meets lady Madeline, he "[finds] it .
Lehal 3.
impossible to account for" (847) his feeling of "dread." (847) It starts to get under his skin how it is possible that so many dark and unexplainable things keep happening; it gets gradually harder not to succumb to the terror. Several days after putting lady Madeline in the tomb, when he would find Roderick gazing off into space as if he were listening to something, the narrator makes a slip. We see how much things are really starting to get to him in this twisted place he finds himself. .
"It was no wonder that his condition terrified - that it infected me. I felt it creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions." (852).
He is a man of science caught in a house of aberrations and he is beginning to lose it.
