Horror vs Terror in Poe's Pit and the Pendulum and the Black Cat

Tobias Wolff’s short story, “That Room” is a very suspenseful story that has the reader on the edge of their seat while reading it. Suspense and excitement is created through the plot and theme of the story which are both developed through four main literary devices. In the story, the narrator is put into what is potentially a life or death situation and it is at this point that he becomes aware that one is never really in full control of his or her own life. Throughout this literary analysis I will discuss the plot and theme of the story in terms of how Wolff uses setting, tone, characterization, and symbolism to enhance both the theme and the plot.

feel isolated and afraid. Moreover, the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” also experiences

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

During the Spanish Inquisition, many people who were not loyal to the Church were sentenced to a trial and in many cases, killed or tortured. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the character was standing before the judge, deep in his thoughts. The sentence of death was a common form of punishment during this time, and he was afraid of receiving this cruel fate. As he looked at the faces of the judges deciding his fate, seven tall candles appeared in front of him, resembling the looks of angels who would perhaps save him.

He tells of the “shadows of memory” (“Pit and the Pendulum” 1), and they come to life as a figurative embodiment of madness and the descent into an acceptance of death. They tell of the “ghastly train” of madness (“Pit and the Pendulum” 5). Throughout the story, his mind and soul take up various personifications and metaphors in order to tell distinctly about the horror taking place. The author speculates terror as a lost mind. Figurative language plays the largest part in delineating the psychological aspect of the events taking place by adding physical imagery of the mind’s behaviors.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe, uses the horror elements of suspense, plot twist, and isolation to add suspense to the story. In the beginning of The Pit and The Pendulum he was guilty for some reason that was not mentioned and woke up in a dark room confused and exhausted. First, suspense is used in the story when Poe wakes up in a dark room not knowing where he is, dehydrated and exhausted. Then Poe is trying to find out where he is and starts walking around and discovers a pit in the ground. After that he falls asleep and discovers that he is tied up and there is something swing closer and closer to him until finally he discovers that is is a pendulum.

Fear in the Pit In the story the Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe, the author creates the theme of fear by choosing points in the story to represent it. Like when the narrator is in the dark room he is feared by the darkness. Also when he is on the table strapped down to the table he was feared that he was going to be left there until he dies. When he was strapped to the table the pendulum swinging above him made him fear death even more.

As he is doing this the pendulum is increasing its speed and he decides that is the way he is going to executed, but as he stares at the pendulum he realizes his executioners were going to kill him with the pit, but decided otherwise when the narrator discovered it. As soon as the rats chew off the ropes that bind him the pendulum rises quickly up into the ceiling and he feels suspicious that he is being watched due to the pendulum rising back to the ceiling. When a pair of mysterious eyes start closing in on the narrator the French army barge into his cell and the French general pulls him back from falling into the pit. This short story shows how death surrounded the narrator at every turn and that was the main torture, not just the pit and the

Poe uses imagery in his stories to also interpret how the fear of evil can motivate a person into doing anything to survive. In Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum, although the narrator is in consternation during the beginning of the story, he is able to calm himself throughout the story. Furthermore, fear can be a good thing with a little help of hope and logic. During the story, the narrator does not give up: “Even in the grave all was not lost. Else there is no immortality for man,” (63).

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe, uses the horror elements of suspense, flight or fight, and plot twist to add suspense to the story. What horror elements are found in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. How does Poe use those horror elements to add suspense to the story? Some background information that have got from this story is to know, and pay attention really closely to what is going on throughout the story. The he is going to be tied the whole time until the end. What are the horror element that I found is what he says, “with the particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained, I thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever I could reach it; then, raising my hand from the floor, I lay breathlessly

Edward slowly stalked out of the dark, dusty cell. A guard lay motionless next to the open door, his throat slit and his face drained of color. He had been trapped in the tiny room for months and he was finally free. He inhaled deeply, taking in the ancient, musty air. The corridor that contained his cell was dark, damp, and humid. There were streaks of red along the walls, most likely due to the massive iron deposits above his underground prison. Edward took all of this in as he crept through the unlit hallway, a small, jagged piece of bloody glass in hand.

'Hello! Anyone? Can you hear me? Bloody hell!' Spittle soared from Charlie Winton's mouth as he swore into the inky chamber around him. A sticky sweat dampened his armpits and broke out in tiny beads along his forehead. His breath caught in his throat as he strained to hear, desperate for any sound to break the silence that threatened to smother him. Time crept along, each laborious moment stretched like a taut rubber band ready to burst. Pebbles of loose scree and razor sharp chunks of newly broken coal stabbed painfully into Charlie's abdomen and chest, raising bright red welts, as he edged his way closer to the gaping hole before him. Faint light from his headlamp showed piles of dust and coal flakes, broken timber and layers of thick,

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

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

“The pit and the pendulum’” by Edgar Allan Poe was a good short story for many reasons one being that the character ever gave up no matter the circumstances. He went through so many punishments and the tortures he went through just to avoid the pendulum thanks to the rats chewing away the rope with some meat he put on the rope. This story was really interesting for me it was honestly one of the stories I liked from my english 3 experience. Not going to lie this story really caught my attention even by the title of the story. Edgar really expressed how he was feeling in his stories that’s one of the reasons I liked this story.