Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” describes the horrors of the experience of a Frenchman being tortured as a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition. In the text, Poe uses word choice, imagery, and mood to display themes of fear and death. The unnamed narrator tells of the Spanish Inquisition, a judicial institution to combat heresy in 1478 Spain. The narrator, a French man in Spain, was arrested, accused, and tried for heresy. The Spanish judges sentence him to death. He says “And then there slipped into my imagination, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.”, comparing his thoughts to music, and death to sleep. The narrator awakens in a pitch-black room, stating that “The