Compare And Contrast The Pit And The Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum
Image that someone is condemned to death and wake to find that he/she can’t even see the hands in front of his/her0 eyes. What’s the feeling of this? The answer of this question will be found in the story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” This is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe during the dark time of his life. The story uses the Spanish Inquisition as a background and builds a strong mood of terror and intense by showing a painful experience of the narrator. The historical setting contributes to the aura of terror in “The Pit and the Pendulum” because the Spanish Inquisition was a period full of torturing and murdering, it creates a dark image inside the reader’s mind, and it helps the readers to understand the

The first reason of why the historical background contributes to the atmosphere of terror is because the Spanish Inquisition was extremely bloody, especially to the people who were heretics. The Spanish Inquisition was a religious court established in Spain from 1480 to 1820. It was in charge of jailing, trail, torture, and executing people who’s in heresy. The reason that this inquisitional system happened was based on ancient Roman law and religious’ power. So due to the cruelty of this historical event, the genre of the story must be negative and thus involving tortured moments. An example from the story to support the evidence is on page 11, the narrator says that, “I could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture.” This quote shows that the narrator can clearly understand the inhuman punishment that given by the inquisitional people, of making the process of death to be so extraordinary. The narrator expresses his realistic feelings base on this brutal history. Therefore, according to the topic that historical setting helps to build the atmosphere of terror, the content of the history plays an important

“I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit, whose extent, of course (page 7).” It is a dungeon full of torturing traps, and as a normal human, the author feels anxious and dreadful inside his prison and fear for his death in these cruel ways. In the beginning of the story, the narrator is afraid of opening his eyes, not because that he’ll see something intense, but because of the darkness. He compares the underground prison to the hell or his tomb. However, there are no differences between the two places, and the prison is even worse than a tomb. The more terror part appears in the back of the story, which is about that the pendulum is getting closer to the narrator and is going to kill him with tremendous torture. “The vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart. It would fray the serge of my robe---it would return and repeat its operations---again---and again (page 12).” In this sentence, the author uses abundant descriptive language in order to express his bad feelings upon the torture, and it appeals to the five senses of the readers. As a result, these events can create a bunch of creepy and scary images inside the minds of the