In The Fall of the House of Usher most people say that the narrator is insane. Is that true?

Arguments that Poe’s narrator is mad usually call
attention to the fact that even at the beginning of the tale he is oppressed by “a sense
of insufferable gloom” and“an utter depression of soul.” Such words suggest that we may
from the start be dealing with a disturbed mind. However, it is not quite fair to offer
these quotations as evidence, since they exist in the following
context:

I
know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense ofinsufferable
gloom pervaded my spirit. . . . I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house,
and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant
eye-like windows—upon a few ranksedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with
an utter depression of soul. .
.

Another passage often cited
as evidence of the narrator’s madness is his confessionthat Roderick’s condition
“terrified” and “infected” him:

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“I felt creeping uponme, by slow yet certain
degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive
superstitions.”

The unnamed
and undescribed narrator of “Usher” is, or presents himself as, a rational man; early in
the story he attempts to give a rational explanation for the influence the house exerts
on him, and later he seeks to explain away the storm as “merely electrical phenomena not
uncommon.” Readers who emphasize the narrator in the story see the irony of a rational
mind yielding to the irrational;for readers who emphasize Roderick and the house, the
narrator supports the truth of the strange narrative, i.e., since a rational mind
reports these mysterious experiences,they gain in authenticity.The chief argument that
the narrator is mad usually rests on the narrator’s report of what finally happened.
How, one can ask, could the emaciated Madeline possibly have the strength to break
through a coffin lid and push open a door of “massive iron” and “immense weight”? How,
indeed, could she have even survived in the coffin,which was placed in a room with so
little air that the torches were half smothered?