Pit And The Pendulum Characterization

Characterization is the creation or constriction of a character. In, “Mericans”, the grandmother is characterized as being awful and very religious. Cisneros writes, “We’re waiting for the awful grandmother who is inside dropping pesos into la ofrenda box before the altar to La Divina Providencia…Blessing herself and kisser her thumb”. The narrator does not like how religious

Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum uses horror and suspicion to build up not only the storyline, but the persona of the narrator in which is also the prisoner. The characteristics of the prisoner ties within the story to create trippy feelings of fear and unassertiveness of whether or not he is truly safe. From the trials that the prisoner has faced, his characteristic of resourcefulness, pessimistic, and terror are revealed and play a salient part of his slick escape.

As you can see, Poe has the narrator terrified of death in the pit. At the same time he has

What do The Cask of Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum have in common. The Cask of Amontillado’s theme is that one man hates the other and will do anything to kill him. This leads into him bringing his enemy into a cave and chaining the enemy to the wall and making it impossible for the enemy to escape by building a wall. The Pit and the Pendulum talks of a man that is sentenced to a prison in Toledo and doesn’t believe in until he is in it. I am going to show The Cask of Amontillado’s and The Pit and the Pendulum’s similarities and differences.

In this story, Edgar Allan Poe (such as in many of his works) uses the setting to create a dark image inside our minds. He makes this specially through darkness, therefore the character makes a connection with death. “The physical setting oppresses him in the visions of his graveyard” (1).

With characterization the reader is able to find out who a character is and what he/she is about. Characterization is a huge part of literature and is almost always present in a story. Without characterization the reader would be left with boring, plain characters. Characterization is super important in literature because it adds a whole new aspect to a story that the reader would have never known without characterization.

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous well known writer known for his dark and gothic horror stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and many others. The well-known author had a rough life which dealt with a lot of death, so most of his stories revolve around this idea. In “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe uses similar themes or darkness to convey tone and conflict throughout the story. His writing style is dark and revolves around one main concept: death. Edgar Allan Poe uses diction and syntax, setting and conflict, and characterization in his writing style to develop his stories.

Characterization allows for you to get a grip on each and every character in a story. If a character wasn’t described, you wouldn’t know what kind of person or choices they’d make. Details on each character help separate and show differences. The characters in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are very different in personalities and problems. Kesey describes Chief Bromden, the

“…but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses-not destroyed them-not dulled them” (Poe 303). This shows how he is so erratic that the so-called disease is making him act the way he is. He is blaming it on the disease and trying to convince the readers that he is actually not berserk. Another way the narrator creates fear is how much time he put in every night to stalk the old man. This is shown when Poe writes, “For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down” (Poe 304). This shows that he would stand there in the darkness for hour’s just listening to the sounds of the old man. Third, the narrator takes so much pride in how clean he did it all. “I then replaces the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye-not even his-could have detected any thing wrong” (Poe 305). One can interpret from this that the narrator was proud of his work and how stealthy he did the deed. Overall Poe uses the setting and the narrator throughout, making the story seem full of fear and dread. It’s shown from the thick darkness and safety of a home to the narrator taking his time stalking the old man and cleaning up the body in a cunning

Characterization refers to the techniques a writer uses to develop characters in the story. In the story ‘A Rose for Emily’, William Faulkner uses characterization to reveal the character of Miss Emily Grierson, the main role. Faulkner’s use of language foreshadows and builds up to the climax of the story. He expresses the content of her character through physical descriptions, through her act, words, and feeling, through the narrator’s direct comments about the character’s nature, and through the actions, words and feelings of the other characters. Faulkner also uses the characterization to examine the theme of the story. His

Characterization is how the characters in the text are viewed and developed as the text expands. For this, I will consider the character, Nyla (purple). Nyla is an innocent girl with dull eyes and voice. Her innocence is revealed as tells of her first time sex encounter and also in her lack of understanding of her mum and sister’s relationship. Her confession of sex to an older man is like that of a young misled child. She is ignorant of the world and its dangers. She just completed high school and is very excited, happy to lose her virginity to childhood sweetheart. Reality drowns on her when she finds out she is pregnant and needed to abort. Her innocence gives her away when she tries to

Additionally, Poe uses the repetition of death in his stories in order to illustrate his own feelings surrounding the topic.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a short story about a guy who is at trial before the spanish inquisitors. He receives the death penalty for an unknown crime. He was put in a cell in darkness where he discovered a, what seemed to be endless, pit. He soon found himself strapped down on a wooden board with only head head and left arm free. There was a pendulum descending down on him, waiting to take away his life.

Picture this. The father of modern crime and detective stories, known as Edgar Allan Poe, is sitting down about to write a beautiful piece of writing and BAM! He whisks away into a story of love, death, and just plain out horror; either characters are losing someone near and dear to their hearts or they are plotting to kill. Edgar Allan Poe, at a very young age, lost both of his parents, and later on in life, lost his wife to tuberculosis, so in one way or another, these stories reflect off of his personal experiences. A major theme in Poe’s writings is death. The theme of death is seen throughout the works of Annabel Lee, the Cask of Amontillado, the Raven, and the Black Cat.

This particular trauma, the death of a loved one, is an emotional trauma, which according to Freud, is “transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs” (“The Uncanny” 13). The reoccurring event is the journey to the tomb. The repetitive nature of Poe’s text also contributes to this idea. The narrator repeats whole parts of lines as if he has already forgotten what he has said. This is exemplified repeatedly in the stanzas