logo

125 pages 4 hours read

The Martian Chronicles

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

“April 2005: Usher II”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“April 2005: Usher II” Summary

A wealthy man named William Stendhal meets with Mr. Bigelow, an architect who has finished building a strange house to Stendhal’s explicit specifications, most of which are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Bigelow is unaware of the story of Poe due to an intellectual purge thirty years previous on Earth called the Great Fire during which all creative works of the imagination, including Stendhal’s 50,000 title library, were destroyed by political and religious groups. Stendhal is pleased with Bigelow’s work on the house (which he calls the House of Usher) and the property but is disgusted by his ignorance and angrily dismisses the man.

Stendhal is next visited by a man named Mr. Garrett, an Investigator of Moral Climates from an administrative body on Earth. Stendhal distastefully greets the man, and Garrett informs him that the “Dismantlers and Burning Crew” (142) will be there in a couple hours to demolish the House of Usher, quoting a law against books, houses, and anything “produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination” (143). The only permissible artistic works, Stendhal reveals, are those which deal in blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text