The Pit and the Pendulum

Amanda Onalaja

October 9, 2009

Pd. 2 – Ms. Brown

I may not have read many of Edgar Allen Poe’s works but, if anything, I know of him to be a Gothic writer. I know of his chilling stories without the use of gore and modern scare tactics. I know of his ability to create eerie situations and unexplainable events. That being said, “The Pit and the Pendulum” had to be one of his milder narratives. I say this because the story isn’t at all odd or creepy. It’s actually enjoyable in a sense that it has an underlying tone of optimism. The narrator actually struggles between an ultimatum – to die or to die. However, somehow Poe manages to find discrete ways to preserve his life and instead of focusing on the grim process of death in the Gothic era, as he usually does, he focuses on the mental process of escaping death.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a narrative piece, therefore it appeals to pathos. Poe wants nothing more in all of his stories than to initiate a reaction from readers. What triggered me was the unusual nature of our narrator. He is somewhat backwards in a sense that he does the opposite of what he says, “I felt that my senses were leaving me”, yet throughout the story we get a detailed sensory description of everything, from the “the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating” to the view of the dungeon, “now to be iron, or some other metal, in huge plates, whose sutures or joints occasioned the depressions”. The tone of the story, which is hopeful, helped in its appeal to pathos because readers were interested in the narrator’s determination. Our narrator doubted himself, “I had little object -- certainly no hope…”, and at some points accepted defeat, “The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed -- I wearied heaven with prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upwards against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble”. Then he would think of these plans to save himself, “I had thought of forcing the blade in some minute crevice of the masonry, so as to identify my point of departure”. Basically, he struggled with utter defeat but if and when he found a shred of opportunity, he would take it, for example the quick acting way he used the chunk of meat to entice the rats. I think Poe might have enjoyed writing this piece, because it kept the audience half disheartened. It seemed our narrator escaped one death trap just to wind up in another one.

The story, overall, doesn’t dive into anything horrifying or in my eyes gory and graphic. In fact, I think Poe purposely averted that. He sets the stage in the time of the Inquisition, where he would have had the freedom to create all kinds of reference to torture. Instead, he focuses on the trials of the narrator and not the reasons of his imprisonment, or his capturers. We don’t even learn of their identities or what happened to them the exact moment he was freed. Actually, that made the story’s end somewhat disappointing. It seemed that Poe was so unused to a happy ending; he didn’t know how to do it! Poe just left our narrator on the brink of death, seconds away from falling into the pit, and then just saves him and ends the story. The ending was so untraditional, but welcomed, that Poe painfully made it brief.