Sunday, January 22, 2012

Reflection: The Pit and the Pendulum


The Pit and the Pendulum is written by Edgar Allan Poe. This work seems to represent both the works or Edgar Allan Poe himself and also the works of the Dark Romanticism literary period. In the dark romanticism period works that we are reading, the authors seem to have been using a mysterious and suspenseful approach in their writings. They use horror, darkness, mystery and suspense.

In this particular story, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” Edgar Allan Poe uses all of the characteristics above. In the very first paragraph of the story, the speaker is already preparing himself for death. Poe says, “The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.” (Poe 263) The speaker is preparing himself for the end. Although he does not know how he will be dying, he is thinking about all the terrifying ways they could brutally kill him. The judge and the jury in this case in the Spanish Inquisition are already scaring the living daylights out of this man of whom we do not know why he is receiving the sentence he is.

The story goes on and eventually the character discovers that he is in a dark dungeon and after a while of observing the walls and ceiling he discovers that the walls are moving in on him. Also, he realizes that there is a giant pendulum suspended from the ceiling moving back and forth in greater arcs and slowly descending to a table on which he is strapped. Rats come along and chew away the ropes just before the pendulum comes low enough to sever his body in two. He is still trapped in the dark dungeon alone though, so his situation still is not one to be happy about. Poe is talking about the rats when he says, “"They were wild, bold, ravenous; their red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited for motionlessness on my part to make me their prey" (Poe 271). The speaker has not yet figured out that the rats are not going to eat him, so his is mortified of death by rats. This description is really intriguing to me because Edgar Allan Poe must have had a freakishly broad imagination to come up with stories such as this one.

After the rats gnaw the ropes off of the victim, the speaker begins to go in and out of consciousness. This pattern of moving in and out of consciousness is much like the pattern in "Ligeia" and is typical of Poe, for in such an alternating state consciousness has some of the characteristics of unconsciousness and vice-versa; one state is imbued the qualities of the other state (May). I think that this method is a very good one and also very well execution of Ligeia in this work. Edgar Allan Poe’s writings sure do have the general characteristics of the Dark romanticism writing era.

The ending of this story was not at all what I expected to happen. Because Edgar Allan Poe seems to always write dark and gory thing, I had figured that the speaker was going to have a gruesome death and I was going to have to read about it. I am very glad that I am wrong and he is saved from the gross death I have predicted.


May, Charles E. "Alternate Realms of Reality." In Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 96–97. Quoted as "Dreams and Reality in the Story" in Harold Bloom, ed. Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1998. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. 

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 263-273. Print.

"Romanticism." Merriam-Webster Online. Web. 22 Jan. 2012. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romanticism

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