Question

Read the excerpt from "The Fall of the House of Usher." From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued. Which best describes the impact of Poe’s tone in the excerpt?

Answer 1

This excerpt follows a grave, slow tone. After Madeleine Usher's return from the grave, the narrator flees in full speed, and all the pasage becomes enraged with fierce, quick action, first represented in the storn, and then with the "wild light" that is "shot along the path", which may be taken for lightning, but an unnatural source of this light is suggested as the narrator wonders what might be the origin of this "gleam so unusual". The reader is thus taken from the realm of nature into the realm of the unnatural or supernatural.