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Pit And The Pendulum Thesis

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One of the most renowned authors of horror and gothic tales, Edgar Allan Poe, creates characters that are exceptional and inimitable in their own rights. Of his most popular tales is “The Pit and the Pendulum”, a story so loved that there have been movies based on it. One of the reasons that this tale is still favored to this day is because of the narrator who is telling his story of his trial, punishment, and near-death experience. In Poe’s story, the narrator is recounting a personal tale in which he was captured by the Spanish Inquisition and sentenced to torture and ultimately death. The narrator takes the reader through every detail of the pit in which they threw him and the circumstances that unfolded within the pit. The narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” emulates a person suffering through anxiety and uncertainty because of his fascination with death, his precise recollection of his surroundings, and the anonymity …show more content…

Poe writes, “The agony of suspense grew at length intolerable, and I cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended, and my eyes straining from their sockets” (444) which contains the word ‘me’. He uses the first-person perspective to draw the reader in and allow a sense of anonymity in which the reader puts themselves into the narrator shoes. This anonymity creates a universality in which anyone reading the story automatically relates to the character. This induces a sense of panic in the reader because not only are they reading what is happening, they seem to experience the circumstances as if they were actually the ones living through them (Bryant). Furthermore, the namelessness of the narrator not only puts the reader in the shoes of the narrator, it puts the reader’s loved ones in his shoes. The sense of universality within the narrator allows for anyone to take his place, permitting the reader to feel empathy, sympathy, anxiety, and

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