Compare And Contrast The Pit And Pendulum And The Tell Tale Heart

Have you ever read “The Tell Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe? It is a short story about a man whose mental state deteriorates over time. The narrator loves the old man, however he has a deep hatred toward the old man’s vulture-like eye. This essay will be explaining the ways Poe keeps his readers in suspense. Edgar Allan Poe uses time, repetition, and descriptive language to set the pace, tone, and mood.

Finally both authors’ stories are rife with symbolism, specifically dealing with the inevitability of time and age. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” the abyss in the center of the dungeon and the swinging, bladed pendulum represent time. The blade gets closer and closer to the helpless victim and even when he is successful in escaping the pendulum, there is another torture in store. The torture – time- is “most unrelenting.” (9) He cannot avoid his impending death.

Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as one of the most influential American writers of the nineteenth-century. Poe’s short stories posses the recurring themes of death, murder and his narrators often show signs of mental instability, like the old man in “The Tell-Tale Heart” and Montressor in “The Cask of Amontillado”. Since tragedy was prominent throughout Poe’s life, his work reflects the darkness ingrained by continuously being faced with adversity. Poe’s mental stability also comes into question when analyzing his works. The use of his unreliable narrators and their psychological issues present the questions of Poe’s own mental capacity. Because of the tragedy that occurred in Poe’s life, his experiences in life may have been influential on his unreliable narrators and his stories.

In the Pit and the Pendulum Poe uses fiction and history. The narrator is caught in the Spanish Inquisition. The character finds himself in a dark pit counting down his time till death. This story is very relatable to people today because people fear their death and know that it will come in due time. Edgar gets in people’s minds and plays with their biggest

Edgar Allen Poe uses imagery in such a way that makes the reader feel as if they were truly in the shoes of the characters. He uses his words to get across his often grotesque or lurid descriptions and create feeling within his readers which are often adjacent to distress or rage. In his short story “The Pit and the Pendulum”, he applies descriptive image words to demonstrate to the audience how the judge's’ garb appeared as they posed over the narrator as he awaited his fate. When the narrator discovers he is trapped in a dungeon with a pit, he begins to surmise he is doomed to spend eternity in the netherworld. Through both of these situations, the readers feel apprehension and later delight at his brilliant machination for escape. Another

Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery to set the mood and to place an image in his readers’ minds of what the narrator is going through. In the “Pit and the Pendulum” the narrator is sentence to a pit as punishment for practicing another religion. Edgar Allan Poe describes, “The blackness of eternal night compassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably closed” ( ). The narrator is describing that his surroundings are unable to make an image out of because of deep darkness of the pit. The dark setting sets a creepy and uncertain tone of the area. The narrator is put in the pit as a process of slow torture, but with the same results. A pitch black setting causes the

Edgar Allen Poe is a writer. He was very into the supernatural and spooky things, often he would write of death and darkness. One of his stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” is a good example of this spooky nature. A man is sentenced to death, but not just by and means, he is to be chopped in have by a pendulum that’s slowly falling his way. At the last minute he is saved.

In “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Edgar Allan Poe uses a selected group of literary devices, to which make this such a successful story. Poe, obviously seen from the story, writes

Edgar Allan Poe was a famous American author who specialised in short story and gothic fiction. One of Poe’s most famous works was The Tell-Tale Heart which explores murder, mental illness, cruelty and horror. The viewer becomes aware of the unprovoked mental challenges between characters which heightens the tension and fear, as darkness envelops the reader and the strong beating of a heart gradually grows louder. In order to create a more dramatic storyline, Poe has applied a range of narrative techniques including characters, point of view, setting, and theme, to amplify the intensity of the text and to elicit fear within the reader.

When darkness creeps into the spotlight of a story you know it will be a great attention grabber. During Edgar Poe’s writing of “The Pit and the Pendulum” he takes a spin on his usual prints, maybe for the reason that it’s one of his earlier writings. The story begins with a person that is in severe peril contemplating the possibility of the death sentence. During this stressful time the character is falling in and out of conciseness, all the

Bernard Beckett, an author, once wrote, “Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.” This declaration fits flawlessly in with the narrator's mindset and thought process in the short story, The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe. Poe’s literature takes place towards the end of the Spanish Inquisition, and is about a man, the narrator of the story, that is sentenced to death by means not known to him. As the character goes through the first phase of this forlorn process his characteristics are revealed by the author. Poe expresses the narrator’s determination to remain hopeful and his optimistic nature through the use of diction, figurative language, and syntax.

In A tell tale heart, author Edgar Allen Poe reveals a theme; you can’t run away from guilt. The story is about a man who killed an elderly man because he thought he was evil. The story takes place mainly in the living room. The main character, edgar, has a conflict when he starts to feel guilty about killing the man. The author writes “ I can hear the heartbeat still beating.” This suggests that he only heard the heart because he knew he done something horrible. The theme can

Edgar Allan Poe is an illustrious writer from the 19th century, notorious for his ominous, melancholic, and lugubrious writing style. The characters and situation in Poe’s story often depicted figures and events from his own life. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” the narrator has been captured by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to death. After numerous methods of torture and various obstacles, the narrator is rescued by General LaSalle of the French army. This reflects on the periods of depression Poe has gone through and how they have been alleviated by his romantic relationships. A common theme Poe wrote about was the doom of man. Poe’s ideology foreshadows certain infamous events such as World War I and World War II.

One way Poe demonstrates suspense in these works is through the use of an unreliable narrator. In both of these pieces, the main character is a mysterious and untrustworthy narrator. In “The Raven,” the narrator starts by saying, “ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / While I nodded, nearly napping” (1, 3). The narrator has just awoken to the sound of knocking at his door. While it is up for debate, the narrator could very well be dreaming or hallucinating about the raven and the tapping, but the reader and even the narrator are waiting for a signal to explicitly show that it is just a figment of his imagination. In the other story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the narrator is introduced to us as criminal who has been sentenced to death. The narrator describes the moment saying, “The sentence—the dread sentence of death— was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears [before swooning]” (263). The reader discovers at the beginning of the story that the narrator has committed a crime so terrible that he has been sentenced to death. The audience spends the whole story trying to figure out when he will die and by which type of torment he will die to. In both of Poe’s works the narrators are unreliable characters who the reader cannot completely trust, which leads to the suspense of waiting for the whole truth.

Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his diction and imagery to create terrifying scenarios and force the reader into a sense of fear and terror. One of his most famous pieces for this is “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The narrator of this story is never identified as they attempt to convince the reader that by several means, they are not “mad”. Through this explanation and the turn of events, there are elements of the story that can be analyzed through psychological criticism and formalism. Using Freud, the narrator becomes extremely interesting looking at the tripartite psyche and how they appear throughout the tale. Speaking on formalism, there are many components that give insight to a deeper meaning than that on the surface. Through this analysis it can be proven that the narrator is, in fact, mad.