The Pit And The Pendulum Gothic Elements

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

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe, uses the horror elements of Supernatural elements,Fight or flight, and isolation to add suspense to the story. “ Might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me” (Poe 12)? “ Demon eyes, of a wild ghastly vivacity glared upon me in a thousand directions” (Poe 11). It talks about the demons looking at him it represents supernatural elements because the walls moved by themselves and then the eyes appeared (Poe 11). It constructs horror because when he was sleeping the pendulum would stay still and when he was awake the people would control the the pendulum and make it lower and start swinging back and forth (Poe 7). There were supernatural

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.

Various authors develop their stories using gothic themes and characterizations of this type to lay the foundation for their desired reader response. Although Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time” are two completely different narratives, both of these stories share a commonality of gothic text representations. The stories take slightly different paths, with Poe’s signifying traditional gothic literature and Taylor approaching his story in a more contemporary manner.

The main themes of Edgar Allan Poe’s works are death, perversity, revenge and destruction. The settings he employed in the given short stories, especially in The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are Gothic. Therefore, naturally the mood of these stories would be dark and sepulchral. However, this is not a trivial employment undertaken to put the reader in a certain kind of zone.

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

Purpose Statement: To write a 900 word analytical essay over Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”

Gothic literature has a different way of captivating the reader. Page by Page, gothic themes are present that create mystery and evoke suspense. The Night Circus, a novel by Eric Morgenstern, “The Devil and Tom Walker”, by Washington Irving, and “The Oval Portrait”, by Edgar Allan Poe share two important themes: eerie setting and isolation. All the stories connect through a lesson that passion can become harmful.

Although now seen as the father of the modern horror story, Edgar Allan Poe was previously viewed as a drunken failure. Within Poe’s writings much of his own life riddled with guilt, anxiety, alcohol, depression and death shines through resulting in works that appear unrelated yet once dissected prove similar. This is true for Poe’s works “The Raven” and “The Black Cat”. Poe’s examples of gothic fiction share the use of the color black and a rapid digression of the narrator 's sanity while seemingly unveiling Poe’s internal pain. Despite these similarities, Poe’s works also differ immensely. “The Black Cat” focuses around death while “The Raven” is fixed around discovering the reasoning for a bird 's arrival. Moreover, gothic themes seen within “The Raven” do not necessarily remain constant when compared to “The Black Cat”.

The Core Beliefs of the Romantics and the Dark Romantics During the Spanish Inquisition, many prisoners, who failed to comply with the Catholic Church or royal authority, were wrenched from their homes only to be sentenced to death in the pit. The pit was described as a dark, lonely, and cold dungeon for these prisoners. They were provided food up to the point of their death by the pendulum, a large swinging blade that slowly descended upon its victims who were tied to a slab on the floor. “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allen Poe, takes place during the final days of the Spanish Inquisition, just before Napoleon's army rescued the prisoners still trapped in the pit.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe, an american writer. Edgar Allan Poe writes most of his poems and short stories with a dark, eerie twist to them. “The Pit and the Pendulum” goes through the struggles and torments of a prisoner, throughout the trial and the imprisonment. A sense of irony is seen in this story. Even though the story is very dreary and hopeless, he somehow finds hope in the end.

Stephen King once said, “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” Bram Stroker, H.P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe may have been a few of the greatest authors of horror to ever live. Out of all of these authors, Poe may have written the most freighting tales. All of his stories are considered horror, but some of them have more horrific qualities than others. “The Pit And The Pendulum” is one of Poe’s most famous works. “The Pit And The Pendulum” by Edgar Allen Poe meets three qualifications of a true horror story.

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.