Look closely at the passages involving the narrator's original household, the fire, and the impoverished dwelling/damp cellar at the end of the tale...

Early in the narrator's
life, he was known for his "docility" and "humanity" as well as his
"tenderness," especially toward animals. These traits followed him into adulthood, and
he found a wife who shared his love of animals and pets; they adopted a number of animals into
their home, including a large and intelligent black cat named Pluto. Pluto was a personal
favorite and would follow the narrator all over the house. They all share a lovely home
surrounded by trees and green life.

However, the narrator admits that his
character "experienced a radical alteration for the worse" as he grew moody and
irritable and selfish: the result of apparent alcoholism. He became violent, even cutting out
one of Pluto's eyes one night. Finally, the narrator says that he descended into the worst kind
of spiritual "perverseness" and hanged the cat by the neck from a tree. He knew that
he wanted only to "do wrong for the wrong's sake only" and that the cat had never done
anything but to love him.

It is this very night that a fire burns down the
narrator's whole house, and his "entire worldly wealth was swallowed up" just hours
after he did a thing that he believed would "jeopardize [his] immortal soul" and
"place it...even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy" of God. The fact that his
entire estate is consumed by flames after he essentially commits his own soul to Hell seems as
though it cannot be coincidence.

The narrator has long been abusive to his
wife and his pets, and he purposely destroyed himself spiritually; as if to suggest that he can
sink no lower in terms of his character, and his position in life declines as well. They are
"compelled" to move into an "old building" as a result of their poverty, the
result of the fire, and the narrator's next act of terror actually occurs in the basementbeneath
the earth as Hell is thought, by some people, to be. It is as though he is symbolically moving
closer to Hell with each despicable act he commits, and he knows it!

In this
way, then, the movement in the story can certainly be symbolic of his mental and spiritual
state.