미국소설AmericanStudies

초록

Horror, Self, and Self-Consuming Writing:Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”Eun-Hye KooPoe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” demonstrates indeterminacy resulting in self-division. In the text, self-multiplication is realized by doubling the divided self of the narrator in the persons of Roderick Usher, and his twin sister, Madeline Usher. In Usher’s room, which is the indeterminate location and has an indeterminate form, the narrator paces, keeping time with the pacing of his double Roderick who suffers from schizophrenia. After the premature burial of Roderick’s double, Madeline, his mental disorder noticeably deepens, until he becomes a victim of the terror that exists only in his mind. In the final scene, as with the physical structure of the House of Usher, Roderick sinks into the abyss of the tarn. Death, selflessness, nothingness, and indeterminacy are inevitable result of the self-division. As “the voice of a thousand waters” become silent, the “House of Usher” (family, mansion, and story) as world of words is no more: the story is over, the text consumes itself into the tarn. Roderick’s, the narrator’s, and reader’s terror can be considered in the postmodern aesthetic context of Lyotard’s sublimity, which puts forth the unpresentable in presentation itself. In this fashion, fear and self-division become representative of the unpresentable and inscrutable nature of reality.

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