Why does roderick usher die

Which it does, pretty much. One conclusion to be drawn from the final scene is that Roderick dies of fear. Madeline rushes upon him and he falls to the floor a corpse, too terrified to go on living. What exactly is going on there? Roderick claims that he and his twin share a special connection, one that others would scarcely understand. 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? Is Usher responsible for the death of his sister and the collapse of his home in "The Fall of the House of Usher "?

It's never explicitly stated that Roderick is directly responsible for his sister's death. Madeline is a vampire -- a succubus -- as the family physician well knows and as her physical appearance and effect upon the narrator sufficiently demonstrate.

The terrified and ineffectual Roderick, ostensibly suffering from pernicious anemia, is her final victim. Roderick suffers from "a morbid acuteness of the senses"; while Madeline's illness is characterized by "a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partly cataleptical character" which caused her to lose consciousness and feeling. Madeline soon dies, and Roderick decides to bury her temporarily in the tombs below the house.

He wants to keep her in the house because he fears that the doctors might dig up her body for scientific examination, since her disease was so strange to them. Roderick knocks on his door, apparently hysterical. What does Usher say is his biggest fear? What expectations does this set up about his fate? This could mean he would go insane.

The fact that Roderick and Madeline are twins is crucial because it emphasizes the close connection between the Usher siblings. If they were just a regular brother and sister, then it would be more difficult to understand how their fates are inextricably linked. The house of Usher designates both the physical home the Usher family lives in and the genealogical line of a family with the last name Usher. The Usher family falls when the last two heirs to the family name, brother and sister Roderick and Madeline, both die in front of the narrator.

When she dies, he dies too. The heartbeat is a symbol of the narrators insanity or guilt. The narrator was experiencing much guilt especially when he was talking to the policemen. It allows him to hear the war drum that forces him to kill. The acute silence makes the narrator so uncomfortable, he must make the old man scream. The narrator thinks that only killing the old man will make all of the surrounding noises disappear.