Literary Strategies in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher' which show that the narrator is having a nightmare

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Regensburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Seminar, language: English, abstract: In the following paper it will be analyzed which hints and possible evidences are in the text 'The Fall of the House of Usher' that prove or indicate that the protagonist is in fact in the middle of a vivid dream or moreover in a nightmare. For that purpose it will be helpful to look at how people dream at the first place and examine which elements a dream typically contains out of a psychological and medical point of view. With this approach it will be easy to compare the findings afterward to the experiences of the first-person narrator. By doing so it should be possible to see if the protagonist of the text is wide awake when he visits his friend Usher or if the last verses of Poe's 'A Dream within a Dream' which say: 'Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?' are suitable for the short story 'The Fall of the House of Usher', too.