Theme Of Gothic Elements In The Pit And The Pendulum

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

With a dash of allusion, a sprinkle of imagery, and a pint of dark diction, once they all mix, you get the dark and scary mood created in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing. Edgar Allan Poe is a poetic writer and is well known for his dark and scary stories and story elements. Edgar Allan Poe uses figurative language, strong diction, and spooky words to build the mood in his works.

Have you ever read or heard a story that made your heart hammer, your knees grow weak, and leave you jumping at shadows? Well, Edgar Allan Poe, a mystery and horror story writer, has written some of the most descriptive and eerie murder stories that can leave you quaking. One of his most sinister works is the “Tell-Tale Heart”. Edgar Allan Poe uses time, repetition, noises, setting, and imagery to effectively create a spooky and disturbing atmosphere in his works. These aspects creates the realistically scary feeling...but how does he apply all that in his writing?

Throughout Poe’s stories, he shows a development of characters through his development of imagery and syntax. As the antagonists’ characters develop, they become more malicious. This development advances the story and allows it to successfully showcase Poe’s idiosyncratic writing style, a suspenseful mood. Overall, his one-of-a-kind style has inspired many authors to write similar types of sober stories and poems. His influence has made a huge impact on schools around the country. Poe’s stories are taught to students to show off his specific type of style. Poe’s use of imagery and syntax influenced the massive industry of dramatic, thrilling, and suspenseful

The chaotic life of Edgar Allan Poe is reflected in his work. The stories The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Cask of Amontillado, are both written using Edgar Allan Poe’s life as a reference. They show elements of his dark depressing life where his mother died of tuberculosis and his dad died as well before he was three. He was then raised as a foster child by his two brothers, Francis and John. He then became a writer of short stories which everyone told him was a mistake. It is also unknown how Poe died which adds yet more mystery to his life. As can be seen, Poe’s life was very dark and dim. This mood is portrayed in Poe’s stories as well. In Cask of Amontillado, Poe writes about a man seeking revenge on his friend and ends up changing him up in the catacombs and then sealing him down there with a wall that he built. The Pit and the Pendulum also has dark elements to it. This story revolves around a prison who fights the battle between jumping into the unknown or letting himself be tortured. Edgar Allan Poe’s writing style in The Pit and the Pendulum and The Cask of Amontillado express conflicts developed by dark and claustrophobic settings, develops a dark mood and tone similar to his own life's mood through dark diction and an immersive point of view, and finally develops a common theme of danger of the unknown by using a limited point of view including ominous, unexplained elements.

In “The Tell Tale Heart”, by Edgar Allen Poe, the reader is presented with the short story of a madman who narrates his murder of an old man because, “he had the eye of a vulture --a pale blue eye, with a film over it” (Poe 105). The narrator has thought thoroughly about his plan to murder this old man, and the murderer then stashes his body underneath the floorboards. Eventually, his guilt overcomes him and he starts hallucinating that he hears the old man’s heartbeat. Ultimately, he confesses to the police about his crime after being driven to the point of insanity due to his remorse. “The Tale Tell Heart” is one of Poe’s best-known stories because he utilizes the elements of Gothic Literature to establish a disturbing sense of mystery throughout the story. Farida characterizes Gothic Literature as “the elements of fear, horror, the supernatural and darkness” (Foster 1), and Poe effectively adopts this style in many of his short story. These ominous characteristics give the story both a dark and spontaneous sequence of events that draws the reader in. In “The Tell Tale Heart,” Edgar Allen Poe employs several Gothic elements such as the setting, emotion, and the word choice in order to communicate an uncertain description of reality. In any case, Poe 's technique definitely holds your attention coming into the story.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Poe, uses the horror elements of isolation, madness, and plot twist to add suspense to the story. In the beginning, the narrator is standing in front of what he describes as judges as they decide his fate, which adds suspense because the audience doesn’t know what could happen to the narrator when the judges punish him. Secondly, he is all alone, or so he believe. He is the only one experiencing the things that are being done, he is isolated from everyone and it is very dark. The narrator thinks, “My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me,”(Poe 3) as he lays on the damp ground. Towards the middle, the narrator going mad because the Spanish

Horror and humor, two words that start with ‘h’ that could either make you cry from laughing, or cry from terror. Poe uses both humor and horror in many different ways in order to create the setting. Humor is used in many different ways, such as a friend who only keeps track of one thing that you say, for instance, the friend who keeps shouting Amontillado! Everyone knows someone who, when feeling under the weather still insists that they are feeling peachy. Poe also uses that in his story to create a relatable, joke that mostly everyone can relate to. He also creates the setting of horror with vivid pictures of different things inside your head. But right as the story has a bit of thrill he turns back to humor again to lighten up the mood.

Edgar Allan Poe has a distinctive and dark way of writing (Poe & Kennedy, pp.22). His mysterious style of writing appeals to passion and sentimentality. Poe’s most prominent works of fiction are gothic. His stories tend to have similar recurring theme of either death, lost love or both. Poe’s psychologically thrilling stories examining the depths of the humanoid psyche earned him much fame throughout his lifetime and after his death. And this distinctive style of writing made him possess his own style of wiring (Arbor, pp.71). There is a psychological concentration which is an important characteristic of Poe’s literatures, particularly the tales of horror that encompass his best and well-known works, such as The Black Cat and The Raven which

Edgar Allan Poe became an author that has grasped the importance of language in his short stories to form the perfect mood and the ability to affect his readers emotionally. In the short story, The Fall of the House of Usher, a man decides to go on a trip to reunite with a friend from his childhood, who suffers from an unknown illness. During the visit, bizarre events occur while staying in his friend’s home. This short story allows Poe to use hints of horror and gothic prose to drive the protagonists into constant mental distress and eventually driving them to madness. Poe incorporates horror and gothic prose such as the unsettling description of the setting, demise, and the fear of paranormal slowly will creep fear upon his characters

Edgar Allan Poe was a famous American author who specialised in short story and gothic fiction. One of Poe’s most famous works was The Tell-Tale Heart which explores murder, mental illness, cruelty and horror. The viewer becomes aware of the unprovoked mental challenges between characters which heightens the tension and fear, as darkness envelops the reader and the strong beating of a heart gradually grows louder. In order to create a more dramatic storyline, Poe has applied a range of narrative techniques including characters, point of view, setting, and theme, to amplify the intensity of the text and to elicit fear within the reader.

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

As a master of short stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is knowledgeable, learned and imaginative. He could skillfully manipulate the words in his literary works to create everything people can think of. The masterful use of the symbols, objects intensify the readers’ nerve as the typical elements of horror in Poe’s short stories, and therefore it is also a feature which makes Poe 's stories different from other writers.

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.

Poe’s writing style was much like that of Hawthorne’s, but drew from the darker side of romance creations. This gothic mood believed in the dark truths of the human heart, which are the ends and motivations for many of his stories. Human corruption and violence ends in murder in “The Black Cat”. Gothic writings move more into the supernatural side, which lets observer of the see a living person in the picture at his first, sleepy glance.