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The main characters of Poes tales usually suffer from depression or a kind of mental disease like melancholy or paranoid schizophrenia. Sometimes similar to Poe, they are sensitive men, poets, musicians, or painters. They are damned by forces beyond their control. In The Fall of the House of Usher the main character is Roderick Usher who suffers from excessive nervous agitation, his complexion is cadaverous, his eyes are unusually bright and he avoids food, light, and sound except in their mildest forms. The narrator is the Usher boyhood friend and he is controlling the consciousness of the tale. He is the representative of the larger world of humanity and has been drawn into the weird world of the mansion. The reader enters that world with him at the beginning of the story and leaves it at the end. So the readers must accept his judgment of the storys actions and the characters. To him, Roderick Usher is both fascinating and frightening. He stays with his friend and tries to help him but never comprehends his engagement with supernatural speculation. He continues to the end to play down the horror in which he is involved, and when the usher points out the luminous mist outside the mansion, he tries to explain it as an electrical phenomenon. He does not want to relate the strange events to the forces beyond the analysis of reason. He is not imaginative and the readers measure his sanity against the madness of usher. Usher is not an ordinary man. His personality is not attractive but the focus of the story is on what he has committed to, what he is suffering from, and his surroundings. Similar to other Poe heroes, he adapted to the world beyond the understanding of the common people. For him, this world is much more real than that of everyday life. That is the world of spirit, that is understood by the sensitive man. Usher is a poet, a musician, and a painter. He is too sensitive to beauty. He uses his intuition and sensibility which are superior to reason. He is a predictor and seer but neurotic and is dominated by an unmanly fear. The evil atmosphere that emerged from the mansion and the surrounding bog destroyed him. Madeline Usher is Rodericks sister and is seen twice in the story. Once she passes like a ghost through the room in which Roderick and his friend are reading and at the end of the story, she falls on her brother horribly. She is suffering from the family curse the same as his brother. She is the negative character we do not see her in-depth and she suffers from a strange malady that is the result of the gaseous exhalation of fungi and vegetation. Some critics believe that the description of Roderick Usher is a self-portrait of Poe at the age of thirty and when he was feeling he was damned by forces beyond his control. At the end of the tale, Madelines death is the other feature of Gothic literature that describes murders, death, or crimes. In The Tell-Tale Heart Poe uses his main character as a first-person narrator, an unnamed character, to heighten suspense and draw readers into the characters situation. he revolves the plot around a raving individual who insists that he is sane, murders an old man because of his vulture eye. As the narrator sees the old man’s evil eye wide open on the eighth night, he decided to open the lantern. the narrator hears the old man’s heart beating, which gets louder and louder. This increases the narrators anxiety to the point where the narrator decides to strike. He dismembers the body and conceals the pieces under the floorboards and ensures the concealment of all signs of the crime. the old man’s scream causes a neighbor to report to the police but he claims that the scream heard was the narrators own in a nightmare and that that the man is absent in the country. Then police chairs are placed on the very spot where the body is concealed. Then the narrator feels uncomfortable and notices a ringing in his ears. As the ringing grows louder, the narrator concludes that it is the heartbeat of the old man coming from under the floorboards. The sound increases steadily to the narrator, though the officers do not seem to hear it. Terrified by the violent beating of the heart and convinced that the officers are aware not only of the heartbeat but also of the narrators guilt. the narrator breaks down and confesses. The narrator tells them to tear up the floorboards to reveal the remains of the old mans body. The Tell-Tale Heart uses an unreliable narrator. The execution of the crime was evidence of his sanity, revealing his monomania and paranoia. The narrator is assumed to be a male but no pronounces are used to clarify one way or the other. The story is driven not by the narrators insistence upon his/her innocence but by his/ her insistence on his/her sanity (self-destructive). His/ her denial of insanity is based

on his/her systematic actions and his/her precision, as he/she provides a rational explanation for irrational behavior. There is a lack of motive and despite this he /she says, the idea of murder haunted me day and night. It is difficult to understand the narrators emotions about the blue- eye man because of the contradiction. It is also possible that the narrator suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He /she experiences auditory hallucinations that are from his/her own head. The relationship between the old man and the narrator is ambiguous. Their names, occupations, and places of residence are not given, contrasting with the strict attention to detail in the plot. The narrator may be a servant of the old man or his child. The vulture eye of the old man symbolizes parental surveillance. The murder of the eye is a removal of conscience. In The Fall of the House of Usher the narrator claims to suffer from hypersensitivity. The old man may represent a rational mind, while the narrator may stand for the imaginative.
Edgar Allan Poe is talented to provoke fear or terror in readers, usually through something demonic. In The Fall of the House of Usher on a dull, dark, and soundless day, the narrator visits Roderick Usher, his boyhood friend. The house of Usher looks out upon a black and lurid tarn and is surrounded by decaying vegetation. The image of the house is reflected in the water and it seems there is an atmosphere peculiar to the whole area, a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued. Before entering the mansion, the narrator notices that its entire front is covered by minute fungi. A valet leads him through intricate passages to the rooms of Roderick Usher. The narrator notices that Usher has greatly changed and realizes that he cannot cheer him who has entered purposefully into a world of strange spiritual reality. Roderick is a musician and painter. One of his poems, titled The Haunted Palace speaks of evil things which overthrow a kingdom of wisdom and light. The lady Madeline dies, and at Ushers request his friend helps him to enter the coffin in a vault in the basement of the mansion. they open the coffin for a last look and notice a faint blush on the bosom and the face, a characteristic that a narrator tells us of death due to catalepsies. In the days following, the interment of his sister, Roderick ignores his ordinary occupations and wanders through the house aimlessly. at times he appears to be listening in profound attention to some sound that only he can hear. On a stormy night, the narrator is unable to sleep and Usher comes to his room in a distraught condition. it points to a window and perceives that a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation hangs about the mansion. The narrator attempts to relieve the hypersensitivity of his friend and reads to him but is interrupted by a knock at the door. Usher cries out that it is his sister at the door, whom he knows they had put living in the tomb. The lady Madeline enters, bloody and emaciated, and falls upon her brother who dies of fright as they collapse to the floor. The narrator rushes from the mansion and he is riding away there is a sound like the voice of a thousand glasses of water and the house of Usher sinks below the tarn. In The Tell-Tale Heart Poe utilizes various elements commonly found in horror stories to depict how a deranged murderer kills a helpless old man in the middle of the night and proceeds to dismember his body before eventually confessing his crime to authorities after experiencing overwhelming guilt. By making the mentally-unstable murderer, the narrator of the story, Poe gives the readers access into the mind of a madman, who continually attempts to prove his own sanity as he recounts his horrifying tale. Poe uses some Gothic elements that contribute to the horror story genre, such as the ominous, threatening mood, the old man’s evil eye, the brutal crime, the nightmare setting, and present elements of fear throughout the story. Similar to many horror stories, the readers experience suspense and mystery as the narrator waits to attack the old man on the eighth night. Every time the narrator goes into the room to look at the man, he always describes the room as being pitch black. Even he takes extra precautions so as not to give off any light in the room. When he goes into the room, he takes a lantern with him but keeps it covered. The only time the lantern gets to shine is when the speaker wants to look at the mans face. In the end, when he pulls the boards from the floor to reveal the old mans hacked body, he says he did it because the old mans heart kept on beating and the sound was getting to him. Poe creates a creepy, scary mood through the narrators denial of madness and the description of the old mans eye.