Teoría de la Literatura

This is the summary of a presentation I have done about The Fall of the House of Usher.

The unity of effect is a unity of tone

Looking for information I found out that Poe believed that the best way to obtain a certain effect on the reader was to keep a unity of tone through the whole text. I think that this principle is perfectly illustrated in this tale.
Each detail is strategically designed to introduce us inside the story, just as the narrator is introduced in the House of Usher.

Gothic setting: irrational fear. Its reflection on the narrator.

This is a Gothic setting, and provokes an irrational fear that attacks common sense, as we can see in the mental condition of the narrator (expressed in page 1 “I know not how it was-but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit”). He is the representative of the civilized society, who goes into a mysterious place –because we do not know where the Ushers live, but it is suggested that the house is placed far away from any city (page 1, “passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of the country”).

Description of the House of Usher –skull-like. Reflect of Roderick.

The House

Etiquetas: Poe

Wuthering Heights has a very complicated narrative structure. There are two clear narrators, but the novel is almost a drama, that is to say, dialogue plays a great part.

Different levels of narration construct the story, not by the usual way of telling the same events from different perspectives, but the participation of characters helps in understanding what happens. It could be said that, instead of a multi-perspective story, this is a multi-layered story. We need to connect every part to obtain a global comprehension. But, at the end, some points remained unexplained (for example, where Heathcliff was born, how he got his money, if Catherine was really a ghost or not...) and even the narrators are not so reliable as they may seem to be –because they are also characters involved in the plot, not omniscient narrators.

In the novel we find two times of reference:

-a “present narrative”, that is a kind of “present time”, when Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange, meets his landlord, Heathcliff, and asks Nelly Dean to tell him the story of his landlord.

-a “past narrative”, that is a kind of “past time”, where the events told by Nelly Dean took place.

Both are interrelated and got mixed during the novel, since the action extends to the present narrative, and the book opens when it is

Etiquetas: emily, brontë