Essay Poe

Comparison between “The house of usher” and “A rose for Emily”

When you read both stories you can see they have some similarities. They present a mysterious setting where you can’t guess what's going to happen and keeps you on edge. In both stories the protagonists are the last of their family bloodline. The stories both end with and unexpected finale, and both finales contribute to the dark and mysterious feeling from the whole story. Since the beginning the stories give a mysterious and intriguing feeling.

With the dark feeling and setting the stories present keeps you interested and encourages you to keep reading. In the house of usher the mysterious setting is established since the beginning as they describe the mansion and continues throughout the story while they describe the characters and how the story unfolds. In a rose for Emily the story started as it seemed a normal story, but as it unfolds we can see as it turns into a bunch mysterious events which makes you wonder what's going to happen next. The families presented in both stories can be assumed they were wealthy in the past, but as the stories unfold we only see the last generation of those families. During the house of usher we see the relation between two brothers and the story tell us that family only reproduced with their own family to keep a single bloodline, but since the two brothers were very sick they couldn't keep on with the family bloodline and as they died the family came to an end. In a rose for Emily, the protagonist was too the last of her family since her father didn't want her to marry claiming that no one was good enough for her daughter, as the story ends she dies, meaning also the end of that family bloodline. As both stories come to an end something unexpected happened.  In the house of usher, Roderick and his friend, the narrator, sealed lady Madeline in a coffin and put her in a chamber thinking she was dead, but as the story continues they start hearing strange noises, that's when they realise that lady Madeline wasn't really dead and they had buried her alive. Lady Madeline gets out of the coffin and goes looking for her brother, when she finds him she goes up to him and murders him, when the narrator sees this he starts running out of the mansion and as he gets out the mansion is swallowed up by the ground and it is left like their was never a mansion there. In a rose for emily, one time we see Emily buying some arsenic and she doesn't tell the seller why she needs it, after this she married Homer Barron and he was never seen leaving the house again. After a while some people were complaining about a bad odor coming from her house and some people sneak around her yard and sprinkle some lime inside her house to stop the smell. When the story ends Emily dies, and the curious neighbors got in their house to see what was inside the second floor room, when they enter the room the body of Homer Barron was in the bed laying down with a gray hair beside him that makes us believe she still slept with him in the room.

Since they have a couple of similar things you can read them and get a sort of similar feeling while reading them. Both stories are interesting and keep you entertained throughout the whole time you're reading it. The similarities discussed above are just three of them, they may have more similarities if you dig in more into the stories and into a more internal analysis of their cores.