Pit And The Pendulum Irony

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe, uses the horror elements of isolation, madness, and plot twists to add suspense to the story. A man is put into a dungeon by judges and is awaiting death. They rig multiple traps for him that he keeps getting out of. First, Poe uses isolation for this story by keeping the man inside a dungeon all alone with no light. He opened his eyes and was immediately felt crushed. He said, “The blackness of eternal night encompassed me” (Poe 3). He wakes from fainting and realizes he cannot see. He feels like the darkness is enclosing him into a tight space. Another element is madness. The judges hang a pendulum to the ceiling that will slowly descend and eventually kill the man. It takes days

The theme in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is death and hope. This is displayed in the poem when the narrator realizes the razor sharp pendulum that has been over him swaying from side to side is not an image, and is getting ready to kill him at any second. In the “Pit and the Pendulum” on page 276 it states, “It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks.” This means the whole time the narrator was in the dungeon he thought the pendulum was nothing but an image of time. When the rats bite through his restraints, he has a feeling of hope that he will escape and not die He feels the same thing

The movie "The pit and the Pendulum" was nothing at all like the book. The

Taking into account the previous descriptions and the definitions of horror and terror we will try to identify which of these stories presents horror and which one may be said to go deeper by portraying terror. The Pit and the pendulum is characterized by having a narrator who seems in absolute use of his mental faculties. As it is mentioned above, this character is aware of what is happening around him and by having a peak of his logical thoughts and feelings the reader experiences the struggle of the narrator to stay alive in a much more personal way. The fact that this character is sane, integrated and coherent in his thinking is one of the reasons why the reader may sense the terror of the story on a whole other level.

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

Poe shows an apocalyptic and evil theme in “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Within the story the main character, who is also the narrator, captured by the Spanish Inquisition, falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and sentenced to death. The narrator is placed in front of terrifying, unforgivable judges. Unable to understand what their saying and terrified of the verdict, he passes out. The story actually describes it as, "

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

How would you feel while you were reading about someone being torched? (Rhetorical question) Well in “The Pit and The Pendulum” by Edger Allan Poe the setting establishes a mood. When the pendulum was coming down it was making the reader tense as the pendulum kept coming “down-steadily down as it crept closer” (Poe 570). This would make the reader tense because they don’t know is he is going to die or if he is going to escape. Poe does a good job giving detail and making the reader feel like they are there. It can also make the reader stand on their toes waiting to know what is going to happen next. For example “the fiery walls rushed back!!! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell” (Poe 574). This is an example of making the reader stand

Poe uses irony to show delusion in many forms throughout his stories. In the story “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe’s narrator, a captured victim of the Inquisition, is threatened physicaly and mentally. The darkness that grasps the cell in which the narrator is held in was able to “oppress and stifle”(Poe 71) the narrator into believing he could not breath. The narrator is in a dire mental state and believes that seven candles were “white and slender angels who would save” (Poe 70) him. When the narrator first wakes up in the dark dungeon he swings between terror and confusion trying to remember how much of what was happening was real. The narrator is simple turning insane.

In his short story, The Pit and the Pendulum he writes “I was sick-sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence-the dread sentence of death-was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears” (Poe quoted in Hamilton). The narrator of this story tried to gain the sympathy of the reader, similar to William Wilson, by describing how ill he was and how others were treating him. In another one of his works, The Cask of Amontillado, the narrator claims “The men Fortunato had done me a thousand wrongs. I bore them as best I could. But when he began to insult me, I vowed revenge. You do understand my nature, will know that I spoke no threats aloud. But to myself I vowed to be avenged, sometime” (Poe quoted in Hamilton). Again, he attempted to gain the sympathy of the reader by making Fortunato seem like an awful person, and that he was right to be angry and want revenge. His use of phrases like “a thousand wrongs” and “I vowed revenge” helped to get his point across, that he was extremely angry with

In addition, one of the greatest distinctions in Poe’s technique is his choice of “dark” words, which add to the genre of his stories. In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, these words portray madness, death, fury, and murder to create fear. For example, when the narrator explains how the old man’s efforts to imagine his fears causeless to be in vain, he says, “All in vain; because Death, in approaching him, had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor heard—to feel the presence of my head within the room” The usage of such disturbing words like “vain”, “Death”, “stalked”, “mournful”,

Edgar Allan Poe is known to be one of the greatest poets in history. Although glorified for his artistic genius, his works tend to follow a dismal central theme to fit his dark and gothic style; whether it be death, betrayal, madness, horror, etc. Two of the many Edgar Allan Poe reads are entitled The Pit and the Pendulum and “The Lake.” The Pit and the Pendulum is a short story that follows an unnamed protagonist who has been convicted and sentenced to death. He writes about the torments endured by a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition.

Death is an important theme in Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”.

The prisoner mistakes the pit for a well at first (cool), only to discover "it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason." Spanish Inquisition & Judges: Could his persecution be a symbol of the narrator's mental illness? Indeed, the morphing torture chamber, being sentence on unknown charges, the inaccurate historical account, could be Poe's way of expressing the whole story is the struggle, fear, and valiant effort to break free of mental illness. This point is a reach, but we'll throw it out there for you to ponder.

In a true horror story, the feeling of terror is often created by suspense. Suspense is the anticipation and anxiety of the unknown, which is a common factor in “The Pit And The Pendulum.” The narrator tells us that “ I am sick- sick unto death.” This description of certain death creates the feeling of anticipation. Poe often uses repetition to create suspense. In this story, Poe creates this feeling by the lack of description. The reader does not know what the storyteller is on trial for. This creates the feeling of the unknown. Another part of the story that creates tension is when the narrator is exploring the dungeon. A feeling of complete solitude and lack of knowledge while in the tomb creates anxiety. The action of the