These diverse readings can be divided roughly into three primary types: natural or psychological, supernatural, and symbolic. In the first approach, the analysis focuses on the “unreliable” narrator as he chronicles Roderick Usher’s descent into madness. As an artist, intellectual, and introvert, Usher becomes so lopsided that his prolonged isolation, coupled with the sickness of his sister, drives him to the edge of madness; along with the narrator, the reader sees him go over the edge. Another possibility is that the tale is simply a detective story minus a detective; Usher manipulates the narrator into helping him murder Madeline and then goes insane from the emotional strain. The crucial “fantastic” elements in the story—Madeline’s return from the tomb and the collapse of the house into the tarn—are “logically” explained in terms of the narrator’s mounting hysteria, the resulting hallucination, and the natural destructiveness of the storm.