Throughout literature, an author's work almost always reflects their mood and character. Edgar Allen Poe was an American writer whose short stories and poems commonly reflected death. One of his short stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher," is about a termination of a family and their home. This short story best represents Poe's sense of despair and gloominess because of the literary element, symbolism, used in this story to create a constant reference towards death.
Poe first introduces the symbol of death as he describes the physical aspect of The House of Usher. The first glimpse of the mansion "unnerves" the visitor in a manner beyond their belief. The windows are described as having "eye-like" appearance and being covered by "minute fungi" which overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a "fine tangled web-work from the eaves." The death like appearance seems to hang over the house, once inside your trapped into this death like state, and the outside the appearance of gloom becomes a death like state when entering the house. The "zigzag fissure that is barley perceptible, extended from the house to the waters of the tarn." The narrator tries to explain the melancholy, a symbol of death all around him, as the result of "very simple natural objects" but he is unable to do so.
At the same time, the narrator is overtaken by "the gradual yet certain atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls." This meaning that Usher and his family has long lived in the lifestyle which causes the setting of death to slip in. They are victims of their own environment only in the sense that they have made their own home one of death. It was this atmosphere which has molded the destinations of his family. The "host of unnatural sensations" that afflicts Roderick, the male that carries on the family name, and his home is also symbolic to the decay of their mansion. The discrimination of Roderick and his home is based on reason and "exciting knowledge who attainment is destruction.
