Fall of the House of Usher, excerpt By Edgar Allan Poe
Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious
warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality of the constrained effort of the ennuyél man
the world. A glance, however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some
moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so
terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the
identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at
times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips
somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a
breadth of nostri unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence of a want of
moral energy, hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; - these features, with an inordinate expansion above th
regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration
the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that
doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things
startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer
texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any
idea of simple humanity
Bored
What is the narrator's relationship to Roderick Usher?