Edgar Allan Poe's Use of Descriptive Language in The Pit and the Pendulum

makes the reader aware of Poe's prominent tone of melancholy. A strong device for the

Edgar Allan Poe is an American Gothic author from the 19th century. It is well known that Edgar Allan Poe was a master of suspense. The word ‘suspense’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary to be ‘A state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen.’ Two of Poe’s works are ‘Ligeia’ and ‘The Fall of the House Usher’. ‘Ligeia’ is the story of an unnamed narrator in love with his wife Lady Ligeia and how he copes with her death. ‘The fall of the House of Usher’ is the story of an unnamed narrator visiting his friend Roderick Usher at his house. Both of them are full of suspense and this is the main topic this essay will be focusing on. This essay will attempt to illustrate how Poe builds suspense in his short stories

The narrator keeps flitting between fear and curiosity he is "a battleground" between these two feelings, but eventually his curiosity wins and he goes to find a better view of the pit.

In both “The Pit and the Pendulum”, and in “The Masque of the Red Death”, the main characters face the possibility of dying, but in “The Masque of the Red Death”, Price Prospero cannot escape his inevitable fate and ends up dead like all his guests. This is contrasted by Poe’s other story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, where the narrator is inexplicably saved at the eleventh hour.

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, uses the grand gothic setting of a torture chamber during the Spanish Inquisition that contains a mysterious pit, symbolizing how the absence of religion in the narrator’s life makes him fear the unknown. Once the narrator discovers the pit, he is filled with dread at the thought of falling into it: “Shaking in every limb, I groped my way back to the wall; resolving there to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells, of which my imagination now pictured many in various positions about the dungeon” (Poe 7). The narrator is a heretic, so he most likely does not accept the idea of life after death. He has likely imagined various fates. Each pit that he has imagined in the room represents a different fate, so he fears falling into them. In fact, the narrator fears falling into the pit more than any other torture inflicted upon him. Poe writes, “Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits -- that the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan” (7). Although the narrator does not know himself what will happen to him after death, but no doubt he has read about what happens to heretics after they die according to Christianity: they go to Hell, where they are tortured for eternity. While his body would die, his soul, the source of his life, would be trapped forever. If falling into the pit leads to this fate, the narrator would greatly fear it. Later in the story the pit begins to

Poe’s use of diction continues to support my thesis. Using phrases such as; “liquid mass of loathsome – of detestable putrescence,” “pungent and highly offensive odor,” “thoroughly unnerved,” “rotted away” and “ejaculations of dead! dead!” this story suggests that any attempt to postpone death will have horrifying results (Poe 7). These are the final phrases of the story. In order to get to this point it is important to look at the

Poe’s psychological approach to the story makes the connection between the reader and the narrator stronger and shows the strategy that Poe adopted in conveying the feelings from the text into the reader’s mind. Thus, what the reader experiences in the process of reading the text reveals exactly what happens to the narrator. In return, what happens to the narrator suggests the process the reader undergoes in the reading of Poe’s story: “The reader becomes an active mediator containing the psychological effects of the story’s utterance, so the narrator’s imagination records a series of psychological effects that constitute the action of Poe’s text” (Bieganowski 178).

He gets up and goes exploring the pit as well as estimating the size of the pit by the amount of footsteps he took around it. His fear is overwhelming him as it puts him right back to sleep, only to then wake up with the pendulum swinging above his head. Darkness also is having a psychological effect on the narrator's mind as he is unable to sleep and does not know what is real and what is not. As Ljungquist states, "The potency of darkness is so extreme that the narrator’s horror is not amenable to explanation by prior association — that is, he fails to account for the intensity of his terror by appealing to previous fearful experiences, either imagined or real” (Web). The narrator is crippled by darkness, he is only able to depend

For these reasons the author creates fear and shows how he put it in the story. The author Edgar Allen Poe makes the room that the narrator is in represent fear. The author explains the room in clear detail and tells us how the narrator has no idea where he is all he knows is that there is a pit in

Secondly, the emotional effect that Poe intends to create is fear. Has he seen horror in the eyes of the reader? I believe so. Much of the

His father was a heavy drinker and left his family and Poe at a young age. His mother was an actress and died on tour, leaving him an orphan at age three. Although he was placed in an orphanage, he never developed a parental relationship. He continued to experience many losses, both friends and family through death from tuberculosis. These losses influenced his writing both in themes and settings. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edger Allen Poe is about a prisoner who has nearly gone insane in the Spanish Inquisition and has accepted that he is going to die. Poe, as a gothic writer, uses anticipation to draw in readers. In the Pit and the Pendulum, the pit symbolizes Hell. Catholics who “fall” metaphorically mean they distance themselves farther from God every time they sin. Poe uses the fear of the after-life to create suspense in his readers. The tortured states, “ I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering, my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me” (350). No matter the prisoner’s crime, it’s sending him straight to Hell. The prisoner knew that the inquisitors created their own little hell for him. He did not know that at the end of his torture, right before death, he was going to be saved by a French general. Poe recognized that humans fear the unknown and made a point to show it through the story’s theme. Knowing that his life is in the enemy's hand drives him crazy and he is finally accepting that he is going to

His denial makes the reader suspicious and wary for signs of insanity throughout the story. As the story unfolds, the reader realizes that the narrator is indeed insane. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the narrator begins with describing his dread and horror, which sets the tone for the whole story. It foreshadows the physical and psychological torture he will be subjected

As a master of short stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is knowledgeable, learned and imaginative. He could skillfully manipulate the words in his literary works to create everything people can think of. The masterful use of the symbols, objects intensify the readers’ nerve as the typical elements of horror in Poe’s short stories, and therefore it is also a feature which makes Poe 's stories different from other writers.

The narrator associates the pit to the “death with its most hideous moral horrors.” The pit put him in such a state of terror because if he wouldn’t have become tripped up, he would have fell right in, to his death. The pit represents the utter doom that could come to anyone that makes a mistake, even if it’s a small one, it could still end up as a catastrophe. Which shows that you should always be cautious of your

Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, writer, editor, and one of the first literary critics. He is probably best known for his poems and his short stories, especially his stories of horror, mystery, and suspense. He is broadly considered the originator of detective fiction. Poe was the literary critic of his time, born in Boston, Massachusetts he may have been the nation's first published horror, mystery and science fiction writer. Poe wrote eerie, grim and cryptic tales. His work as a poet and a critic had a profound impact on literature everywhere. He is generally considered as the creator of the modern short story. To this day he is one of the most widely read Authors of the 19th-century. He appeals to all kinds of different readers, the