Insanity In The Tell-Tale Heart And The Fall Of The House Of Usher

In the many achievements of Edgar Allen Poe, the concept of insanity absorbs the environment of the plot and the characters, which occurs prominently in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Using the fears of the past and present, Poe descends his characters into madness via the horrors that we all experience at one point or another. Whether those phobias consist of a premature burial, the fear of being accused guilty or insane, or the paranoia existing somewhere inside ourselves, Edgar Poe magnifies them into a powerful form of influence that grasps the audience’s attention, and never lets them go.

In the world of Edgar Allen Poe’s fictional accomplishments, nothing remains safe from the clutches of insanity, the plot included. In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” insanity plays a major influence. For “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the unstable condition of the mind comes into the story when the supposedly last member of the Usher family,
Both “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” contain characters that have descended into insanity. The only character that shows signs of insanity in “The Tell-Tale Heart” is the narrator himself, despite continuous attempts to prove otherwise. This character believes that he can prove his sanity by intricately explaining how he murdered an elderly man due to his prosthetic eye and his “loud heartbeat,” which is presumably in the narrator’s head. For “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the person of little sanity, the name being Roderick Usher, remains convinced that the house he lives in causes sickness, in addition to his theory that his sister remained alive, but buried prematurely. In a way, the two characters follow the same pattern, in which their madness sends them to their untimely