The description of the House of Usher communicates an overwhelming sense of unresolved gloom. This gloom is captured in a Gothic lexis of despondency, darkness and loneliness which promise the solitary traveller no catharsis or epiphany. The first person narrator delivers up this gloomy world vividly to the reader through recurring literary techniques including triples, dashes, alliteration and repetition. It feels as if the melancholy landscape is drip-feeding depression, mesmerising the narrator, drawing him into a world that is unremittingly uneasy and claustrophobic. The narrative is fragmented, foreshadowing the madness of the inhabitants within the house and the destructive effect on the mental health of the interloper -narrator. The personification of the house itself with the ‘vacant’ and ‘eye-like windows’ creates further unease as if the house is sentient and expectant, despite its ostensible indifference or absence. The rhythm of the writing reflects the movement of the approaching horse and rider who are inextricably drawn into the nether-world of the house despite their awareness of its sinister aspect and character.
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was — but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me — upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain — upon the bleak walls — upon the vacant eye-like windows — upon a few rank sedges — and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees — with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium — the bitter lapse into every-day life — the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart — an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it — I paused to think — what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down — but with a shudder even more thrilling than before — upon the re-modelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
