Fear in The Fall of the House of Usher

        The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe is quite obviously a dark, fear inducing short story. As soon as the reader begins the story, they are met with words such as gloom, insufferable, decayed, depression, etc. They are also met with alliterations such as “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart...”(Poe 1). The narrator uses these descriptive words in order to depict fear. Fear is a prevalent idea in the short story as horrific occurrences take place in the House of Usher. In one instance, the narrator explains that Roderick’s biggest fear is fear itself, “ To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results...I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect--in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition--I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR." (5). At the end of the story, Roderick, becomes a “victim to the terrors he had anticipated”(15). He witnesses his sister, whom he had presumed to be dead, appear in front of him and dies from fear— he did not die because she physically harms him—  it was all because the fear was too much for him to handle. Fear plays such a large role in The House of Usher, that it

contributes to the death of a character.