The Pit And The Pendulum Analysis

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

Edgar Allen Poe is one of the greatest Sci-Fi/Mystery writers of all times. Two of his most popular poems, “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” have elements that relate to each other but at the same time they differ. The use of suspense in his poems is proficient, and it makes the readers want to read on because they are intrigued and they want to know what is going to happen next! Poe gives a good example of what an unreliable narrator is in his poems, he shows that sometimes they can’t be trusted because of their actions and what they say and do. The themes in the two poems are greatly different, but show a clear panorama of what the poems are going to be about. While the theme in Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” are different, the way he used suspense and unreliable narrator are alike.

It is a well known fact that Edgar Allan Poe‘s stories are famous for producing horror or terror in his readers beyond description. However, it is one of this essay’s attempts to precisely describe these two characteristics present in The pit and the pendulum and The black cat. Horror may be defined as “the feeling of revulsion that usually occurs after something frightening is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced. It is the feeling one gets after coming to an awful realization or experiencing a deeply unpleasant occurrence.” On the contrary terror is described as “the feeling of dread and anticipation that precedes the horrifying experience” These two concepts are thought to be crucial when analyzing Poe’s writings. It is going to be

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.

these things occur throughout the story but can seen at the end of the story as the walls of

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).

The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 horror film directed by Roger Corman , starring

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

This essay will discuss the themes in Poe’s writing that mirror his personal life and, in addition, the fear and supernatural motivators for his characters. First, I will discuss Poe’s background and explore how he became best known as a poet for his tales of mystery and macabre.

In the poem The City in the Sea death rules in a lonely city where the buildings are unfamiliar and everything comes to rest by the melancholy waters. For example, In the poem it states “Lo! Death has reared himself a throne...where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest” (Thompson, 63). By personifying death the author sets the tone of Gothic setting in many of Poe’s writings. Moreover, “Death looks gigantically down.

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.

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.