Madmen and Moonbeams: The Narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Author(s): John C. Gruesser

Source: The Edgar Allan Poe Review , SPRING 2004, Vol. 5, No. 1 (SPRING 2004), pp. 80-
90
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41498737

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 80

Madmen and Moonbeams: The Narrator

in "The Fall of the House of Usher"1
John C. Gruesser

Two related but nevertheless discreet issues figure prominently in criticism

on "The Fall of the House of Usher," perhaps Poe's most frequently
reprinted and analyzed work of fiction: rationalism versus supernaturalism
and reliability versus unreliability. Poe's ingenious straddling of two types
of Gothic stories - ones in which supernatural events actually do occur
and ones in which there are rational, if at times highly improbable,
explanations for apparently occult phenomena - makes his best tales
unforgettable and ripe for critical debate.2 For some readers, only the
existence of a supernatural connection between the Usher family and the
mansion in which they dwell can account for the coterminous demise of
Roderick and Madeline Usher and their ancestral home. For others, either
there is a natural explanation for the uncanny events recounted in the
story or the narrator is deluded about one or more of the bizarre occurrences
he relates. This, of course, leads to the second issue, the narrator's
reliability. Traditionalists see no reason to doubt the narrator's veracity;
therefore, everything he says should be believed. Skeptics, however, regard
him as, at best, deeply untrustworthy and, at worst, completely insane.3 In
this essay I will argue for a middle position. Although the narrator believes
he is merely chronicling Roderick's precipitous descent into madness, he
is also documenting his own more subtle mental deterioration. The final
step in this process occurs as a result of his having witnessed the
simultaneous deaths of Usher and his sister, which he recounts in the
penultimate paragraph of the tale. Evidence that the narrator has reached
a delusional state appears in the final paragraph when he openly contradicts
himself about the storm he claims envelops the mansion. Thus, Poe
constructs the tale so that readers will harbor reservations about some of
the things the narrator claims he has witnessed but not doubt the veracity
of everything he tells us, thereby creating a speaker who differs from both
the author's anonymous narrators who are wholly reliable, such as the
person telling us the story in the Dupin tales, and those who are pervasively
unreliable, including the man who claims to have been Ligeia's husband.

Because the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher" assumes the
pose of a rationalist, linking his credibility to the question of wheth
supernatural events occur in the tale may seem appropriate. Yet if

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 81

decouple these two issues, interpreting the story becomes somewhat

simpler.4 To illustrate this point, let's consider the following four key
questions relating to the tale and then answer them in connection with,
first, the issue of supernaturalism and, second, the issue of reliability: 1)
Is there really a separate atmosphere that surrounds the mansion? 2) Are
Roderick and the narrator sane or insane? 3) Do Roderick and Madeline
die simultaneously? and 4) Does the mansion collapse into the tarn? If,
on the one hand, we interpret the story from a rationalist perspective, we
would either a) accept the narrator's natural explanation for the atmosphere,
deem Roderick mad for his belief in the occult and the narrator sane for
his rationalism, attribute Madeline's death to exhaustion and starvation
and Roderick's to his nervous condition, and regard the wind and/or
lightning from the storm as the factors responsible for the collapse of the
mansion, or b) cast suspicion on the truth of one or more of the seemingly
inexplicable occurrences the narrator relates. If, on the other hand, we
turn to the supernatural to account for the events in the story, then we
would believe that a distinct atmosphere surrounds the house because it is
alive and negatively affects the Usher family. Roderick is as sane as the
narrator because the occult events Usher describes actually do occur,
Roderick and Madeline die together because one cannot exist without the
other, and the house falls because it is preternaturally connected to the
family. However, if we address these same questions in connection with
the issue of reliability, we get two very different sets of answers. Convinced
that he can be trusted, traditionalists accept the narrator's assertions that
the mansion (at least by the end of the story) has its own meteorological
system, that Usher is mad and the narrator is sane, that Roderick and
Madeline die at the same time, and that the house collapses into the tarn.
In contrast, those skeptical about the narrator's credibility doubt one or
more of his assertions: the atmosphere does not exist, the narrator is insane,
Madeline never enters the room so she and Roderick cannot die together,
and/or the house, if it ever even existed, does not come tumbling down.

At this point I would like to turn to the final paragraph of the tale, the
portion of the story in which, I contend, the narrator is no longer reliable.5
He informs us that, after beholding the demise of Roderick and Madeline,
he flees from the room and the house out into the storm, crosses the
causeway, and looks back just in time to see the mansion crumble and be
swallowed up by the lake. Thus, the narrator's account of his departure
seems to suggest that he has been converted from a strict rationalist position

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 82

to the belief that supernatural events do occur. However, in this concluding

paragraph, he makes an assertion that undermines his believability. Even
though he contends that the "storm was still abroad in all its wrath," the
narrator claims immediately thereafter that "a wild light" shoots along the
path, and he attributes the source of the light to "the full, setting, and blood-
red moon, which now shone through that once barely-discernible fissure"
in the mansion.6 As the rent in the collapsing building widens, the narrator
avers that "the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight" (335).
Yet how can the narrator see the moon if the storm, earlier characterized by
an "exceeding density of clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the
turrets of the house) [...] without passing away into the distance" (331), a
density so complete that the narrator and Roderick "had no glimpse of the
moon or stars" (331), continues "in all its wrath" (335)? Although it can be
argued that the word "Suddenly" suggests that the storm ends abruptly,
eclipsed not by a revelatory sun but rather an ominous harvest moon, two
sentences later the narrator claims he feels "a fierce breath of the whirlwind"
(335), which indicates that the storm, at least in the narrator's mind, is still
there in full force. Moreover, the narrator indicates that the "shadows" of
the "vast house" were "behind" him as he fled from the mansion, but how
could the edifice have cast shadows prior to the appearance of the "wild
light" (335), given the absence of the moon, stars, and lightning?

If we grant that paragraph 41 (particularly when coupled with paragraph

28) contains a contradiction, then we must decide whether it is a mistake
on Poe's part or whether he placed it there deliberately. Perhaps in writing
the concluding paragraph, the author forgot about the density of the clouds
he described earlier in the story, clouds which remain anchored around
the house and thus are not part of a storm passing through the area. For
many readers such as myself, who delight in Poe's attention to detail and
the pains he takes to produce certain effects, this explanation simply won't
do. Poe has the narrator assert that the storm continues unabated and then
right afterward claim he beholds the entire blood red moon for a reason.
This leaves us with two possible interpretations for the story.

If, on the one hand, a separate atmosphere does exist around the house
and a storm so thick that it precludes any "glimpse of the moon or stars"
within this atmosphere continues "in all its wrath," then the narrator should
not be able to see any part of the moon, much less "the entire orb of the
satellite," and thus must be delusional at this point. The implication of

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such an interpretation is that nothing the narrator tells us in the final

paragraph (including his account of the collapse of the mansion) can be
trusted. Moreover, it suggests that the events immediately preceding the
closing paragraph, namely the tempest, Roderick's anticipation of his sister's
arrival, Madeline's appearance in the narrator's room, and the simultaneous
deaths of the Ushers, have compromised the narrator's ability to distinguish
what is real from what isn't. If, on the other hand, a separate atmosphere
does not exist around the house, which would mean there is no storm
because the tempest is said to exist in the vicinity of the mansion only,
then the narrator has been delusional from the beginning. The implication
of this interpretation is that nothing the narrator tells us in the story as a
whole can be trusted. Either way, paragraph 41 casts suspicion upon the
credibility - and the sanity - of the narrator. In the remainder of this short
essay, I will explain why I believe a reading of the narrator as only somewhat
unreliable has greater merit than one that regards him as pervasively so.

At the start of the tale, the narrator raises the question of whether the
mansion has its own atmosphere. As he approaches the edifice, this
"strange fancy," as he calls it, pops into his mind (319). Although he
dismisses it first as "ridiculous" and later as "a dream" (319), he
nevertheless provides a possible explanation for the existence of a
meteorological system peculiar to the House of Usher, referring to the
gaseous haze that appears to envelop the mansion as "an atmosphere which
had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the
decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic
vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued" (319). Later
Roderick will assert that the house not only has its own atmosphere but
has exerted a "terrible influence" on his family, "moulding] the destinies"
of his ancestors as well as himself (328). In response to this statement, the
narrator says only that "[s]uch opinions need no comment, and I will make
none" (328). Even though he has had a similar impression about the
mansion, the narrator adopts the pose of an ultra-rationalist here, suggesting
that Usher's beliefs do not even merit consideration. His self-imposed
silence, however, is telling. A clear-thinking rationalist would analyze
Roderick's contentions, dismissing those rooted in fantasy rather than reality
and recognize that there are really two issues here. First, have the decaying
trees, the vapors from the tarn, and the house's isolation and antiquity
indeed somehow combined to create a distinct atmosphere around the
house? If not, then Usher in this passage and the narrator at the start of the
tale and elsewhere are deluded. However, if the mansion does, in fact,

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have its own meteorological system, then it is necessary to address the

second part of Roderick's claim: are the fates of the two Houses of Usher
inextricably and preternaturally linked? If they are, then the storm raging
outside the mansion reflects the turmoil in the family caused by Roderick
burying Madeline alive. However, to believe there is such a link between
the edifice and the Ushers requires us to accept the existence of supernatural
phenomena, a position which a rationalist - whether the narrator in the
pose he assumes in the story, I would argue, Poe himself - could never
embrace. Whatever one's opinions on the presence of a separate atmosphere
and the connection between the house and the family may be, the narrator's
claim that Roderick's assertions deserve no comment must be seen as
disingenuous and evasive.

The narrator would have us believe that he is documenting the men

decline of Roderick - his nervous agitation, his conviction that fear
be his undoing, his bizarre artwork and musical compositions, his assertio
that the house is alive, his mad hilarity on the night of the storm, and h
death of fright in the embrace of his bloody, deceased sister. Prior to th
climactic moment, however, the narrator has admitted that, in spite of h
rationalist pose, both the gloomy mansion and Roderick's mental st
have unsettled him. In reference to the latter, he says, "It was no won
his condition terrified - that it affected me. I felt creeping upon me,
slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic y
impressive superstitions" (330). Moreover, despite his weird habits a
the very real possibility that he planned and then carried out the premat
interment of his sister, Roderick distinguishes reality from illusion muc
more effectively than the narrator in the final pages of the tale. While t
latter tries to ignore the noises that he hears emanating from the
subterranean crypt in which he and Roderick sealed Madeline and rejects
Usher's seemingly implausible explanations for them, Roderick awaits
the arrival of his sister. Clinging to the pose of the rationalist, the narrator
attempts to find a more prosaic explanation for the gradual opening of his
chamber door, attributing it to "the work of the rushing gust" (335). He
immediately corrects himself, however, reporting that Madeline is indeed
there and that she falls dead upon her fatally terrified brother.

It is important to keep in mind that as bizarre as the events the narrator

describes are, they may have rational (as opposed to supernatural)
explanations, as implausible as these may be. If Madeline is cataleptic

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and if Roderick suffers from pathological fear, then it is possible - at least

within the realm of Poe's fiction - that Madeline may not have been dead
when she was put in the crypt and, after struggling to free herself from her
coffin and tomb, may have sought out the brother who buried her alive
and ignored her cries for help and that, upon seeing and being seized by
his bloody, vengeful, and moribund sister, Roderick may have died of
terror. Similarly, there may be a natural explanation for the collapse of the
House of Usher. G. R. Thompson suggests a bolt of lightning touching
off gunpowder in the mansion's underground vault, but it could simply be
the whirlwind toppling the ancient and already cracked edifice.7 However,
as noted above, if the narrator has proven himself delusional through his
contradictory statements about the storm and the moon, then his assertion
about the building's disintegration is highly questionable. Perhaps the
would-be rationalist narrator, if he were simply reading or hearing about
the events chez Usher and not experiencing them firsthand, could himself
postulate natural explanations for these occurrences. In order to
compensate for the unnerving effects that Roderick, Madeline, and their
ancestral home have had upon him, however, the narrator adopts an ultra-
rationalist approach. Roderick is mad, not the narrator; therefore, the
uncanny effects Roderick believes the house has upon him and his sister
cannot really be taking place, and Usher must be wrong about the sounds
coming from the vault and the imminent appearance of his sister. The
narrator seems to be operating under a false syllogism: A. Everything a
madman perceives is a delusion. B. Roderick is mad. C. Therefore,
Roderick's assertions about Madeline must be false. Yet the narrator's
major premise is not always true. Madmen often speak the truth. As
strange as Roderick may be - and Jeremy Irons' famous line from Reversal
of Fortune ("You have no idea") comes to mind in connection with him8 -
at the end of the story he has a firmer grasp on reality than the narrator, so
much so that it is Usher who impugns the narrator's sanity, twice calling
him the "Madman," and he is within his rights to do so because to ignore
one's senses willfully, as the narrator has done, is a sign of delusion.9

As he admits, the Usher family and its residence influence the narrator
throughout the story. Thus, it is not surprising that seeing the simultaneous
deaths of the brother and sister - the most bizarre of all the strange
happenings in the House of Usher - profoundly impacts the narrator's
already unsettled mental state. An unaffected man would not "fle[e] the
house aghast" (335) but rather summon the servants, alert the authorities,

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 86

and make funeral arrangements. The contradiction regarding the tempest

and the "wild light" in the final paragraph suggests that the narrator has
lost his ability to separate fantasy from reality and has therefore become
unreliable. Unable to provide a rational explanation for the events that
occur just before he departs from the mansion, the now delusional narrator
apparently embraces Roderick's occult belief about the link between the
family and the house, and, after seeing a moon that is not there - or
(although this seems less likely to me) a moon that has always been there
even though he claimed it was not - convinces himself that he witnesses
the house fall into the tarn in confirmation of Roderick's superstition.

In reference to the case for pervasive unreliability, I reject its implicit

absolutism and find that it places too much of the focus on the narrator.
Skeptics tend to think of reliability in the same manner that many people
conceive of innocence: once it has been the least bit compromised, no
matter what the circumstances, it has been irrevocably lost. Thus, the
argument seems to run, if the narrator of "The Fall of the House of Usher"
has given readers cause to believe that any of his perceptions of the events
he witnessed in and around the mansion lack validity, then nothing he
tells us about his experiences should be credited. However, as Bruno
Zerweck has persuasively argued in his diachronic study of the subject,
narrative unreliability "is culturally and historically variable."10 Thus,
instead of an all or nothing proposition, unreliability should be seen as a
matter of degree comparable to the concept of insanity. The legally
accepted condition known as temporary insanity recognizes that in certain
(often extreme) circumstances people can momentarily lose their sanity
and recover it at a later time. Emily Dickinson's famous phrase "A little
Madness" may be strictly metaphorical, but people whom society deems a
little bit crazy do indeed live and work among us, just as they did during
the nineteenth century, and I contend that Poe, who knew a thing or two
about both madness and narrative point of view, regarded unreliability in
terms of gradations, at least in this story.

Although the narrator has served as the focal point for this essay, the extent
of his role in the story should be kept in perspective. In distinguishing his
traditionalist position on the tale from that of the skeptics, Patrick Quinn
suggests that one of the key issues in interpreting the "The Fall of the
House of Usher" is whether Roderick or the narrator functions as the primary
character.11 Even though, as outlined above, I differ from Quinn on the

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question of the narrator's reliability at the tale's conclusion, I see a danger

in lumping him in with pervasively unreliable narrators in Poe, such as
Montresor in "The Cask of Amontillado," Egaeus in "Berenice," and, in
particular, the narrator of "Ligeia." These men, a self-confessed murderer,
a monomaniac, and a drug-addled amnesiac respectively, dominate their
stories to a much greater degree than do the people with whom they are
obsessed - Fortunato, Berenice, and Ligeia. The latter character, in fact,
may never have existed except in the mind of her purported widower.12 In
contrast, Roderick plays a major role in "The Fall of the House of Usher;"
thus, to assert that the narrator totally lacks reliability, that he has been
delusional about everything he relates in the story, including the existence
of Roderick, would be, for all intents and purposes, to deprive the story
and the author's corpus of one of its most memorable characters. Because
the narrator plays a key but nonetheless limited role in the story, because
unreliability is a relative concept, and because the narrator's delusional
state in the concluding paragraph serves as the final step in the progressive
unhinging of his psyche over the course of the tale, I find the middle
position between the irrefragable reliability advocated by traditionalists
and the complete unreliability claimed by skeptics to be the most appropriate
means of approaching "The Fall of the House of Usher," widely regarded
by critics and anthologists as a, if not the, quintessential Poe story.

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88

Notes

1 . For their suggestions for improving this paper, I would like to thank Carole Shaffer-
Koros, Dean Casale, Richard Katz, Kelly Anspaugh, G. R. Thompson, Richard Kopley,
the members of the audience at the 2003 Modern Language Association Convention
session on "The Undisclosed Poe," organized for the Poe Studies Association by
Terence Whalen, and the readers for The Edgar Allan Poe Review.

2. Numerous studies of Poe's relationship to the Gothic have been published, including
G. R. Thompson's especially useful Poe's Fiction : Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). For a helpful overview of gothic
fiction, see Chris Baldick's introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (NY:
Oxford UP, 1992): xi-xxiii.

3. Critics have taken sides on the reliability of the narrator for decades. The most
extended debate on the subject, between Patrick Quinn and G. R. Thompson, appears
in Ruined Eden of the Present: Hawthorne , Melville , and Poe , eds. G. R. Thompson
and Virgil L. Lokke (West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1981).

4. The graph below may help readers more easily grasp the argument:

Four Key Questions about "The Fall of the House of Usher"

1) Is there really a separate atmosphere that surrounds the mansion?

2) Are Roderick Usher and the narrator sane or insane?
3) Do Roderick and Madeline die simultaneously?
4) Does the mansion collapse into the tarn?

These Questions Relate to Two Separate Issues

a). Are there rational (if improbable) or supernatural explanations for the events
in the story?

Question Rational Explanation Supernatural Explanation

1 The Tarn and decaying flora The house has a separate atmospher
around the house have created a because it is alive, and it has long had a
separate atmosphere. deleterious effect on the family.
2 Roderick is mad because he Roderick is sane because the occult
believes in occult phenomena. phenomena he describes are real. T
The narrator is sane because he narrator is also sane.
does not.

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 <39

3 The cataleptic Madeline dies of Madeline and Roderick cannot exist

exhaustion and starvation in the without one another, so they must die
arms of her excessively nervous together.
brother, who dies of fright at the
same time.

4 The decrepit mansion collapses The mansion collapses because it is

because of wind and/or lightning preternaturally connected to the now
associated with the storm. deceased Usher family.

b). Is the narrator reliable or unreliable?

Question Reliable (Pervasively) Unreliable

1 There is a separate atmosphere. There is not a separate

2 Roderick is mad; the narrator is Roderick and the narrat

sane.

3 Roderick and Madeline die Madeline never enters the room;

together. therefore, they do not die together.
4 The mansion collapses. The mansion does not collapse.

5. The final paragraph of "The Fall of the House of Usher," particularly when read in
conjunction with paragraph 28, contains a contradiction that undermines the narrator's
credibility.

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still
abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway.
Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence
a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows
were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and
blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through the once barely-
discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the
roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this
fissure rapidly widened-there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind-the
entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight-my brain reeled as I
saw the mighty walls rushing asunder-there was a long tumultuous shouting
sound like the voice of a thousand waters-and the deep and dank tarn at my
feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the " House of Usher!'
(Paragraph 41; boldface added)

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 90

The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was,
indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in
its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our
vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alternations in the direction of
the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to
press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-
like velocity with which they flew careening from all points against each
other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding
density did not prevent our perceiving this-yet we had no glimpse of the
moon or stars-nor was there any flashing forth of lightning. But the under
surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial
objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a
faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about
and enshrouded the mansion. (Paragraph 28; boldface added)

6. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Edgar Allan Poe : Poetry , Tales ,
and Selected Essays (NY: Library of America, 1996): 335. Subsequent references to
this edition of the story will be provided parenthetically.

7. Thompson, 94. See also pp. 334-36 of Thompson's "Poe and the Paradox of Terror:
Structures of Heightened Consciousness in 'The Fall of the House of Usher,'" Ruined
Eden of the Present.

8. Reversal of Fortune. Dir. Barbet Schroeder. With Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, and
Ron Silver. Warner Bros, 1990.

9. Although I am not convinced by Daniel Hoffman's interpretation of "The Fall of the

House of Usher" in Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: LA State UP, 1972) as
"a tale of the personal apocalypse of the unconscious [Roderick], as told by the conscious
mind [the narrator]" (314), his reading of Roderick's words to the narrator in the
penultimate paragraph anticipates this portion of my argument to an extent: "Most
readers think it odd that Usher, who is as crazy as a bedbug, should call Narrator a
madman. But then, mad though he is, Usher knows more of the truth than Narrator, with
all his common sense, could possibly guess" (309). Unlike Hoffman, however, I see the
narrator desperately and unsuccessfully clinging to what he believes is a rationalist
position despite the evidence that Roderick's assertions about his sister are correct.

10. "Historicizing Unreliable Narration: Unreliability and Cultural Discourse in

Narrative Fiction," Style 35.1 (Spring 2001).
>.

11. See p. 307 of "A Misreading of Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher,"' Ruin
Eden of the Present.

12. For a reading that questions the existence of the title character of this story, see
essay, "'Ligeia' and Orientalism," Studies in Short Fiction 26.2 (Spring 1989): 145

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