The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe

The Fall of the House of Usher

-Unity of Effect: single overall feeling
-Poe had a plan/purpose for everything; his particular focus was exploring the strange, fantastic, conveying psychological terror through carefully chosen details and events.
-Mood: the feeling or atmosphere; obtained by the word choice, how the story is set up.

The narrator goes to the house of Usher to visit his friend. The friend and his sister are connected to the house, and because they are damned and dying, the house is slowly dying along with them. They are the last members of their family. Roderick is a hypochondriac, sensitive to everything. He himself looks dead. He ends up entombing his sister alive to "end her suffering," but he can hear her scratching at the coffin and screaming. She escapes her encasement and finds Roderick, and the two die along with the house. The narrator leaves the house before it crumbles to the ground and is absorbed by the swampy land that it stood on.