According to Dictionary.com, death is defined as the termination or extinction of something. Edgar Allen Poe used this definition all throughout his story, "The Fall of the House of Usher". After reading the story several times to try to pick up on any thoughts or emotions Poe intended the reader to grasp, I found that unlike most stories, E. A. Poe had no idea of a moral or an idea of reason behind the story of the House of Usher. Under my impression, he wrote this story to scare the living shit out of people. So...why and how does Edgar Allen Poe scare people even to this day with "The Fall of the House of Usher"?
             Edgar Allen Poe didn't have the best of lives growing up in Boston at the turn of the 19th century. Death has incorporated somehow into his life from the age of less than a year when his father died until his own death in 1849. Edgar Allen Poe is classified as a writer in the Romantic Period. Writers in this period focused on life, emotions, and the existence of the human race. Even with Poe being in the Romantic Period, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is classified as a Gothic piece. With this eerie setting, Edgar Allen Poe's stories get even scarier when he goes into the greatest of detail on everything; (we went over his "overboard" descriptions in class).
             One way I noticed that I picked up on late into reading was the fact that he does not refer to any sense of hope, light, or goodness in the story. In other words, everything in that story is related to death, misery, or cynicism somehow. When I say everything, I mean everything; this includes people and the house and even includes the time of day and the weather.
             The physical aspect of the story also deals with death. The opening line, "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day...", is just as famous to me as Herman Melville's opening line in Moby Dick, "Call me Ishmael&...