o Characteristics in story that make it relate to this movement LIT 2020 JONATHAN BELLOT MIDTERM REVIEW What will be on Test Know Stories Know Literature Movements Know certain things he discussed in class Each Story has Plot Characters Themes A certain Movement Story Structure List of Stories 1 The Fall of the House of Usher 2 The murders in the Rue Morgue 3 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge 4 The Ministers Black veil 5 The lady with the Dog 6 The Yellow Wallpaper 7 Nightfall 8 Continuity of Parks 9 The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World 10 The Prophets hair 11 The Bloody Chamber 12 Sonny s Blues List of Literature Movements 1 The Gothic 2 Romanticism 3 Realism 4 Modernism Class Notes Story Structure Length of Short Story Subcategories LIT 2020 JONATHAN BELLOT MIDTERM REVIEW I The Fall of the House of Usher a Plot i An unnamed narrator arrives at the House of Usher a very creepy mansion owned by his boyhood friend Roderick Usher Roderick has been sick lately afflicted by a disease of the mind and wrote to his friend our narrator asking for help The narrator spends some time admiring the awesomely spooky Usher edifice While doing so he explains that Roderick and his sister are the last of the Usher bloodline and that the family is famous for its dedication to the arts music painting literature etc Eventually the narrator heads inside to see his friend Roderick indeed appears to be a sick man He suffers from an acuteness of the senses or hyper sensitivity to light sound taste and tactile sensations he feels that he will die of the fear he feels He attributes part of his illness to the fact that his sister Madeline suffers from catalepsy a sickness involving seizures and will soon die and part of it to the belief that his creepy house is sentient able to perceive things and has a great power over him He hasn t left the mansion in years The narrator tries to help him get his mind off all this death and gloom by poring over the literature music and art that Roderick so loves It doesn t seem to help As Roderick predicted Madeline soon dies At least we think so All we know is that Roderick tells the narrator she s dead and that she appears to be dead when he looks at her Of course because of her catalepsy she might just look like she s dead post seizure Keep that in mind At Roderick s request the narrator helps him to entomb her body in one of the vaults underneath the mansion While they do so the narrator discovers that the two of them were twins and that they shared some sort of supernatural probably extrasensory bond About a week later on a dark and stormy night the narrator and Usher find themselves unable to sleep They decide to pass away the scary night by reading a book As the narrator reads the text aloud all the sounds from the fictional story can be heard resounding from below the mansion It doesn t take long for Usher to freak out he jumps up and declares that they buried Madeline alive and that now she is coming back Sure enough the doors blow open and there stands a trembling bloody Madeline She throws herself at Usher who falls to the floor and after violent agony dies along with his sister The narrator flees outside he watches the House of Usher crack in two and sink into the dark dank pool that lies before it i Narrator The narrator is an enigmatic character One way to explain his role is that the narrator s job is simply to narrate the story We don t know his name which is representative of us knowing nothing about him at all He really only exists in relation to the Ushers and that relation is primarily as an outsider ii Roderick Usher is not well While parts of his affliction seem to manifest themselves physically in his overly acute senses his illness is primarily a mental one While his sister is cataleptic and wasting away Roderick is tormented by to be quite honest his own fear By his own admission he doesn t so much fear any particular thing as he fears his own fear And one day he predicts this affliction will kill him b Characters c Themes LIT 2020 JONATHAN BELLOT MIDTERM REVIEW iii Madeline There are several different directions you can go in your interpretation of Madeline Usher One theory is that she doesn t fully exist from the start but is some sort of supernatural shade a spiritual doppelganger half of Roderick Doppelganger means ghostly double This is why the narrator rarely sees her and why she doesn t acknowledge or interact with him during those times It s why she can come back from the dead because she wasn t fully human in the first place i Madness The Fall of the House of Usher is the story of a sick man whose fears manifest themselves through his supernatural sentient family estate Sentient means able to perceive things The story explores both physical and mental illness and the effect that such afflictions have on the people closest to those who are sick One interpretation is that much of the seeming madness of the main character does turn out in fact to be the cause of truly supernatural events That is he s not crazy his house really is haunted and his sister really is back from the dead Another interpretation is that the madness really is imaginary ii Family Usher explores a family so bizarre so self isolating so removed from normalcy that their very existence has become eerie and supernatural The bond between the featured brother and sister characters is intense and inexplicable possibly it s supernatural possibly it s incestuous Their bond transcends even death One interpretation of the tale is that the siblings are actually one person split in two thus one is unable to survive without the other d Movement i Gothic e Structure i Linear LIT 2020 JONATHAN BELLOT MIDTERM REVIEW II The Muders in the Rue Morgue First modern Detective story a Plot i An unnamed narrator begins this tale of murder and criminal detection with a discussion of the analytic mind He describes the analyst as driven paradoxically by both intuition and the moral inclination to disentangle what confuses his peers He adds that the analyst takes delight in mathematical study and in the game of checkers which allows the calculating individual to practice the art of detection not only of the moves integral to the game but also the demeanor of his opponent The narrator argues however that analysis is not merely ingenuity He states that while the ingenious man may at times be analytic the calculating man is without fail always imaginative The narrator then describes the