Horror movies have been a very popular genre of movies to watch throughout the past generations. What keeps audience members coming back to watch more and more of these movies is not just the twisted plot but the suspense. The suspense keeps audience members on the tips of their toes anticipating the next move. Will the main character die in seven days as said in the tape, is the hero finally going to be able to forget about the atrociousness and tragedies he/she went through? As in movies, Edgar Allan Poe concocted a short story that keeps its readers on edge, waiting for a seemingly inescapable fate as the main character was set out to perish in a very unique manner in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The audience views the innermost thought …show more content…
As the narrator discusses his experience the audience discovers that, “Death surrounds the narrator in various forms. The fact that death does not actually befall the protagonist is unusual for Poe,” (Bouchard). Even though the short story is macabre and filled with the likely possibility of death, the narrator never actually dies. This allows readers to ponder over death. Even in the title, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the audience can view the pendulum as a symbol of death as it swings back and forth towards the narrator. Additionally, fear plays a major role in the theme of the short story. The narrator finds himself in a “rather nightmarish, symbolic story about every person’s worst nightmare and an allegory of the most basic human situation and dilemma,” (May 96). Throughout the entire story, the narrator lives in a constant state of fear: fear of being submerged into darkness, fear of falling into the pit, fear of being scorched alive, even fear of being drugged in his drink. The narrator went through something that no person ever wants to go though, evading death by pure luck. Yet, throughout his ordeal he had to overcome and prevail in the times of these fears. It allows readers to ponder over their own fears and ask themselves why and what they are truly afraid of. Lastly, there is a combination of these two themes as the narrator describes his situation, “Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me?” (Poe). This was at the beginning of his torment where he had no idea what was to happen to him. Death was promised to him by the Inquisition but he did not know how he was to face it; it was the beginning of fear being bestowed into his mind that anything could happen at any time and there was nothing he could do to stop it. These themes cause readers to ponder over
Have you ever been so close to death you thought you were dead… or wished you were? The story, The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allan Poe, is about a Frenchman who was visiting Spain and was caught up in the Spanish Inquisition in 1806. He was captured by the church-men who ruled the terrifying land he had ventured to. “They arrested, accused, and tried me… all on the charge that I did not worship God as they did. And for that I was going to die.” The Frenchman was tortured, not only physically but mentally as well, and found himself at death’s door throughout the story.
In “The Pit and the Pendulum”, the atmosphere is dark and unsettling. In addition to the setting and characters, there are various other factors that give the story a creepy feel to it. Furthermore, the narrator’s thoughts and descriptions add to the ominous mood of the story. For example, the tale states, “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” (Poe 5). At this point in the story, the narrator, falling into his torturers’ trap, tips on the verge of insanity and begins to lose hope. The reader can easily picture the narrator, cowering against the wall, eyes wide, flinching at the slightest of sounds. Therefore, along with the horrifying aspects of the torture chamber, the unstable narrator and his thoughts create a foreboding and macabre feeling characteristic to gothic
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
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.
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
The Pit and the Pendulum is about a man who is sentenced to THE PIT during the Spanish Inquisition. The story starts out as describing his trial and quick sentence to THE PIT. Next as he is in
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).
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
this movie deserves to be tagged as a Edgar Allan Poe story because it contains suspense, the
In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” poe uses the elements of unknowingness, fear, and fight or flight, descriptive words to add suspense to the story. The man within the story is being sentenced to death because of his faith, he is found guilty and then taken to a duongen and tortured, he is put through 3 different ways of tortures before a french general saves him. First when he is laying on the stone table he decides to do this, ¨At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes, my worst thoughts, then, were confirmed¨ (Poe #3). The previous sentence shows that he was fearful of the situation he is in. Second when he now knows he can't see he does this, ¨Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we
“…All sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night were the universe.” This quote from “The Pit and the Pendulum” is an excellent example of how Edgar Allen Poe is a master at using point of view, setting, and conflict to display the thematic message of fear in his short stories. This example uses all three literary strategies. The setting contributes to the theme of fear by stating that the soul was descending to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, or hell, a place that will almost definitely draw a fear response in the reader. He uses conflict by having the reader infer that the story is about a dying person, and so on. He finds unique ways to do this with all types of literary strategies, but most prominently with point of view, setting and conflict. He especially uses point of view in a unique way, making the narrator either mentally unstable or having some other unusual ailment. Therefore, after thorough analysis of both “The Black Cat” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” it is clear that Edgar Allen Poe is a master at using setting, conflict, and point of view to help display the unique thematic message of fear throughout almost all of his literary works. Firstly, Poe uses setting to convey the theme of fear in “The Black Cat” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. In “The Black Cat”, the climax of the story takes place in a cellar. “At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar,” The
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.
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
Additionally, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a nail-biting narration of a prisoner being kept in a dungeon. Unaware of what his fate will be, the narrator assumes he will suffer death by hanging, until he explores his unlit surroundings and finds he is in a dungeon with a deep pit in the floor and a pendulum like scythe swinging from the ceiling above. Left to die, the narrator is saved in his last moments of despair by General Laselle who has taken over the prison as part of his crusade to end the inquisition. Perhaps one of Poe's most aspirant pieces of writing, the narrator in the “The Pit and Pendulum” never relinquishes himself to what the reader may view as an inevitable, certain death.