(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. This could be for any number of reasons, and you’re welcome to speculate. It’s possible that Roderick knew Madeline was alive when he asked the narrator for help in entombing her. Another theory involves far less psychology and far more revenge. Alternatively, if Roderick may have been intentionally speeding up his own death by burying Madeline early, making her burial something of a suicide attempt. If this is true, we can see why Roderick cannot live while Madeline is dead, which explains why she comes back for him. See, e.g., Supernatural Horror in Literature by H.P. Those who approach “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a psychological tale posit that Roderick and Madeline are actually two halves of the same person: male/female, mental/physical, worldly/other-worldly, natural/supernatural. Another, less controversial interpretation is that they share a sort of extra-sensory bond. As we discuss in the “Sex” section, one interpretation is that they are incestuous. What exactly is going on there? Roderick claims that he and his twin share a special connection, one that others would scarcely understand. But let’s talk about this brother-sister connection. As we’ll talk about in Madeline’s “Character Analysis,” it’s even possible that Madeline is just a physical embodiment of Roderick’s fears. Madeline rushes upon him and he falls to the floor a corpse, too terrified to go on living. One conclusion to be drawn from the final scene is that Roderick dies of fear. And one day, he predicts, this affliction will kill him. By his own admission, he doesn’t so much fear any particular thing as he fears his own fear. While his sister is cataleptic and wasting away, Roderick is tormented by, to be quite honest, his own fear. While parts of his affliction seem to manifest themselves physically, in his overly-acute senses, his illness is primarily a mental one.
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