SOURCE: "The Face in the Pool: Reflections on the Doppelgänger Motif in 'The Fall of the House of Usher'," in Poe Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, June, 1972, pp. 16-21

In the following essay, Thompson offers a reading of

uThe Fall of the House of Usher" that highlights its parallel structures and ironic tone. ]

In Heart of Darkness (1898-99), Joseph Conrad's first narrator comments on the conception of the meaning of a narrative held by Marlow, who is himself the narrator of the basic tale of his pursuit of his psychological double, Kurtz, and to whom Conrad's first narrator listens as one sitting in darkness waiting for light. The first narrator comments that Marlow, unlike other tale-spinning sailors, saw the significance of a narrative not as a core meaning of some kind but as a system of structures: "The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning...