Major Themes Mortality: The plot of Poe's tale essentially involves a woman dying, being buried, and rising from the grave. But did she ever die? Towards the tale's horrific ending, Usher shouts, "We put her in the grave alive!" Premature burial was something of an obsession for Poe, who featured it in many of his stories. In “The Fall of House Usher,” however, it is unclear to what extent the supernatural can be said to explain the strangeness of the events in the tale. Madeline may actually have died and been resurrected as a vampire, just as Usher appears to possess vampiric qualities, emerging "from a couch on which he was lying reclining" when the Narrator first sees him, avoiding all daylight and most of food, and wandering around his crypt-like abode. But a more realistic version of events suggests that she may have been mistaken for dead and fortunately escaped from her grave. In any case, the line between life and death is thin in Poe's fiction, and Usher's study of the "sentience of all vegetable things" fits Poe's concerns perfectly. Madness: Poe writes that Usher "entered, for a time, into what he conceived to be the nature of his disease." What exactly his "disease" is we will never know. Even Usher seems uncertain, contradictory in his description: "It was, he said, a constitutional and familial evil, and for which he despaired of finding a remedy - a simple nervous affection, he immediately added, which would no doubt soon pass." off." The narrator notes an "inconsistency" and "inconsistency" in his old friend, but offers little in the way of a scientific explanation of the condition. As a result, the line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred, which paves the way for the descent of the Narrator in madness: if we were to try to precisely define Roderick Usher's illness, we might diagnose him with acute anxiety. What seems to terrify Usher is fear itself. I found him a bound slave." Usher tries to explain to the narrator that he fears "the events of the future, not in themselves but in their results." He fears the intangible and the unknowable; he fears precisely that which cannot be rationally feared Fear, for no apparent reason other than ambiguity itself, is an important motif in Poe's tale, which after all begins with the Narrator's description of his irrational fear: a sense of unbearable sadness pervaded my spirit..