Sunday, June 25, 2017

What occurrence in the weather foreshadows doom for the Usher family The Fall of the House of Usher?

From the opening line, the weather is ominous and foreboding:

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 . . .

The sense of gloominess in the weather invades the narrator's spirit, and he finds himself "unsufferable" as he approaches the House of Usher.
The weather comes into sharp focus as the fateful night at the end of the story unfolds. Roderick asks the narrator whether he has "seen it" and throws open a window, where a torrential storm is brewing outside. The narrator notes that it is "wildly singular in its terror and its beauty," much as Madeline Usher evolves over the story. The wind blows in "frequent and violent alterations," and the clouds hang heavily. There are no stars and no lightning.
This violent storm signals the violent end of the Usher twins, and therefore the House of Usher. This is just before Madeline seems to reappear from death and Roderick completely breaks with sanity. In the House of Usher, no light (or hope) remains. Their world is spinning out of control, teetering on the brink of imploding in on itself. The storm's intensity seems to be a precursor of the tension among the three characters as the plot reaches a climax.
After the narrator believes that he witnesses Madeline kill her brother (which could be the narrator's own inner storm, influenced by the troubled mind of his friend Roderick), he flees the scene as the storm is "still abroad in all its wrath."


The weather is gloomy as the narrator arrives at the House of Usher, but it is a wild, ghastly storm that foreshadows the doom of the Usher family. The narrator reads aloud to Roderick as the storm rages. The weather outside is dark, wild, and tempestuous. A whirlwind forms, and the wind keeps changing direction. Meanwhile, heavy clouds are blown this way and that, while the atmosphere glows with a strange, gaseous light, though no stars or moon can be seen.
Then, as the storm increases in violence and the window frames shake, noises indicate that Madeline is arriving from the crypt. She enters the room and falls down dead. At this point, the narrator races from the house. Bolts of lightning and a "blood red" moon reveal the house fissuring and collapsing into the tarn as the narrator flees the scene.

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