Major ThemesMortality: The plot of Poe's tale essentially involves a woman who dies, is buried, and rises from the grave. But is she already dead? Near the tale's gruesome finale, Usher cries, "We have laid his life in the tomb!" Premature burial was something of an obsession for Poe, who wrote about it in several of his stories. In "The Fall of the House of Usher", however, it is unclear to what extent the supernatural can be seen as explaining the strangeness of the tale's events. Madeline may in fact have died and been resurrected as a vampire - just as Usher appears to possess vampiric qualities, emerging "from a couch on which he was lying full length" when the Narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most food, and wandering around his crypt-like home. But a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead and fortunately managed to escape from her grave. Regardless, the line between life and death is fine in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the "sentience of all things vegetable" fits Poe's concerns perfectly. Madness: Poe writes that Usher “entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his illness. What exactly his “disease” is, we will never know. Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description: "It was, he said, a constitutional and family illness, and for which he despaired of finding a remedy - a simple nervous affection, he added immediately, which would pass without doubt soon. disabled." The Narrator notes an "inconsistency" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but he offers little scientific explanation for the situation. As a result, the line between sanity and madness becomes blurred, which opens the path to the Narrator's own descent into madness: If we were to try to precisely define Roderick Usher's illness, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. For an abnormal species of terror," Poe writes, "I found him an enslaved slave." Usher attempts to explain to the Narrator that he fears "the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results." . He fears the intangible and the unknowable; he fears precisely what cannot be rationally feared. Fear for no apparent reason, other than ambiguity itself, is an important motif in Poe's story. which after all begins with the Narrator's description of his own irrational fear: "I don't know what it was like, but, from the first glimpse of the building, a feeling of unbearable sadness permeated my mind.