In his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", Edgar Allen Poe presents his reader with an intricately suspenseful plot filled with a foreboding sense of destruction. Poe uses several literary devices, among the most prevalent, however are his morbid imagery and eerie parallelism. Hidden in the malady of the main character are several different themes, which are all slightly connected yet inherently different. Poe begins the story by placing the narrator in …showed first 75 words of 1617 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1617 total…a prisoner. Even in the narrators words he viewed him as a "slave" of the house. All Roderick wanted was to be free from the "Daemon of Death", and only death would free him from his insanity and the confines of his house. Poe's graphic portrayal of imagery enhance every aspect of the story, from the suspense of the story itself, to the wild personalities of the characters and the similarly morbid themes inherently present.