How does madeline kill roderick

It is in crumbling condition and yet remarkably stable. The writer, Edgar Allen Poe, chose to purposely not give the narrator a name. This gives the narrator credibility in his meeting with Roderick and the events leading to the downfall of the family name. He can account for how he knew Roderick as a boy and how he has changed so many years later. Hover for more information. The fact that Roderick and Madeline are twins is crucial because it emphasizes the close connection between the Usher siblings.

Twins were often presented in popular literature as being possessed by dark, Satanic forces that made them especially prone to commit unspeakable acts of evil. As such, Roderick Usher is the protagonist of the tale. In Poe literature, the protagonist need not be an admirable hero. Another, less controversial interpretation is that they share a sort of extra-sensory bond.

See, e. If this is true, we can see why Roderick cannot live while Madeline is dead, which explains why she comes back for him. Alternatively, if Roderick may have been intentionally speeding up his own death by burying Madeline early, making her burial something of a suicide attempt.

Another theory involves far less psychology and far more revenge. Was he trying to end the Usher line once and forever? Tormented with guilt over the incest they may have committed together? Trying to kill himself by killing his doppelganger other half?

Doppelganger means ghostly double. In this scenario, Madeline comes back from the dead to get even with her brother for burying her alive. We can also think about the spooky connection that Roderick shares with his house. He tells the narrator that he thinks it is sentient or conscious, and that the house is largely responsible for his feeling so dark and gloomy. Many of his artistic compositions revolve around his house or thinly veiled haunted mansions that act as stand-ins for his own.

But Madeline proves central to the symmetrical and claustrophobic logic of the tale. Madeline stifles Roderick by preventing him from seeing himself as essentially different from her. She completes this attack when she kills him at the end of the story. Doubling spreads throughout the story. The tale highlights the Gothic feature of the doppelganger, or character double, and portrays doubling in inanimate structures and literary forms.

The narrator, for example, first witnesses the mansion as a reflection in the tarn, or shallow pool, that abuts the front of the house. The mirror image in the tarn doubles the house, but upside down—an inversely symmetrical relationship that also characterizes the relationship between Roderick and Madeline.

Poe composed them himself and then fictitiously attributed them to other sources.