Edgar Allen Poe was an American writer that lived and wrote in the 19th century. Poe's writings are known for their macabre subject matter. The dark imagery in his "The Fall of the House of Usher" gives the reader an intense environment of pure terror to reside in while he is in the story, as well as giving him a view into the mind of Poe himself. In this story, Poe uses the life-like characteristics of an otherwise decaying house and other inanimate objects as a device for giving the house a very supernatural atmosphere. (Baym)
             The first five paragraphs of the story present the arrival of the narrator and describe the House of Usher and its bleak surroundings. The narrator, who is a childhood companion of Roderick Usher's, arrives to find an old mansion with "the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the gastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows. (Poe 350)" His first view of the house comes in a large pool of tarn, or swampy, dead matter, surrounding the house. The narrator, who remains nameless throughout the story, immediately says that he is filled with "a sense of insufferable gloom. (Poe 350)" This is Poe's way of foreshadowing the dark, dreary conditions he is going to be displaying for the reader during the story. Poe emphasizes the tarn around the mansion several times in the opening paragraphs. The narrator compares the view of the house in the pool of tarn to "the after-dream of the reveller upon opium. (Poe 350)" He uses all his logic and reason to try and view everything he sees in a rational manner, yet upon looking over the house and its surroundings, he has a heightened sense of superstition. He goes on to say that, "about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity. (Baym)"
             The narrator, upon entering the house, sees a typically furnished 19th century dwelling. However, he becomes confused as to why familiar o...