Usher Mental Illness

Mistakes, accidental incidents, the hard truth; all come together to create a larger picture of one truth. The picture tells the truth about a subject that seems to be made out of pieces of a puzzle rather than a whole; being the pieces may be oddly shaped. Though this sounds unreasonable, the undesirable occurs to people in any situation; some being dealt with positively while others in an hyperbolic way. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe creates a metaphor of the codependence of one’s mind and body through the use of the Usher twins.
First, the twins are bond together in an excessive mean that the two are as of one psychologically unfit person. The relation of the two Usher siblings is not alluded to until later in the
Poe characterizes Roderick with having a mental illness early in the story. In the letter to the narrator it states, “The MS. have evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness-of a mental disorder which oppressed him” (2). Roderick explains to the narrator about his illness through a letter in order to get the narrator to visit him. The mental illness is also shown, with the toll it partakes on Roderick’s physical appearance. The narrator describes him when he is younger with having, “an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison” to a more recent description of having, “ghastly pallor of the skin” (4). Poe adds more vivid descriptions about the character and compares his appearance from his earlier years. The traits of the past were more lively comparatively to the more recent characterization. The words “luminous” and “ghastly” are vast contradictions in his appearance. “Luminous” describes the bright light in his life while “ghastly” describes the frightful death within Roderick. The death description allows to show the formation from a healthy person to unhealthy with a mental illness. Lastly, Roderick talks to the narrator about the conceivement of the disease itself. He explains to him the reason of his illness is due to a “constitutional and family evil” (5). He is mentally ill because in his family, they connect in
The two are part of a family that is a direct line which excludes many outsiders. As it states in the story, Madeline is “his sole companion for long years” (5). Due to the fact that the siblings are always together in their life, the two become similar or as one. The two are parts of one person. Moreover, the two are the same which is shown in their death. Roderick talks to the narrator of his sister's sickness. He talks of when she dies, he states that he will be “the last of the ancient race of the Ushers” (6). When Poe kills off Madeline he only does so temporarily and under false pretenses. Later in the story, the death of the twins is shown simultaneously. The story states, “In her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse” (15). Rather than having one of the twins die at the same time in the story, as Roderick hints at in the beginning, Poe causes them to die at the same time. The scene of their death adds to their connectedness. If one twin would have died, then the other twin would have been left to fend for themselves alone. They would be the last of their line. Yet, instead the two die together as though they are one person. In sum, the two are bond together as though to be one person from the result of their family lineage and its isolation as a