Prominent interpretations of "The Fall of the House of Usher"
from Stephen Peithman, The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe. New York, 1981. Pp. 60-1.

1. We are to take the tale literally as a tale of the supernatural, and thu everything takes place exactly as the narrator describes. it.
2. The narrator, although rational enough at the start, by slow degrees comes under the influence of the mad Roderick Usher, so that by the end of the tale he is hallucinating. The tale thus represents the fall of reason, the inability of the rational mind to make sense of a chaotic universe.
3. Events and characters are symbolic of the workings of the human mind on the brink of insanity. In this theory. Madeline and Roderick (who are twins) represent the unconscious and the conscious, and when Roderick denies the other's existence, he seals his doom. The fall of the house represents his ultimate breakdown--suggested by his strong identification with the building and underscored by the poem The Haunted Palace. Some see Roderick as the Ego, Madeline as the Id, and the narrator as the Superego, or mediating force, concluding that the war between the first two is simply too strong for the latter to overcome.
4. The tale symbolizes what Poe termed the "hypnogogic" state--that condition of semiconsciousness in which the closed eye beholds a continuous pattern of vivid and constantly changing forms. The tottering condition of Usher's mind, say the proponents of this theory, and the equally shaky condition of the house, as symbolic of the drop into unconsciousness and the escape from the material world in sleep.
5. Events represent the dilemma of the romantic artist, who in his ever-continuing search for the Sublime may eventually come to a point where he leavs the real world behind and plunges into madness. The romantic search is thus at once enticing and laden with hazards.
6. The tale is a working out, in their early stages, of Poe's theories of the creation and destruction of the universe--his concept of Unity, which is first made clear in "MS Found in a Bottle." Since final union with the Godhead provides us with both ultimate knowledge and the means for our annihilation, the "incestuous" reuniting of Roderick and Madeline at the climax of the tale symbolizes the catastrophic event that Poe sees as inevitable.

Sources for the tale include "Thunder Struck," in Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician (1835), by Dr. Samuel Warren, in which a young woman falls into a cataleptic trance and "dies"; a storm rages, the characters think they hear a sound coming from her burial place, and she returns covered the blood."

A notable "borrowing" is Ray Bradbury's "Usher II" in The Martian Chronicles (1950).