Comparing The Pit And The Pendulum By Edgar Allan Poe

The story begins with a death sentence being placed upon our narrator from an unknown court for an unknown crime. The protagonist describes the inexorable horror of the black-robed judges as they announce their edict. But the narrator himself is too overcome with despair to understand them and so he falls into a slumber while eager for demise. He wakes up in utter darkness, wondering how much was a dream and how much was reality. At first, he fluctuates between dread and turmoil, but then attempts to recall the events of the past few days before opening his eyes. Instead of the public ceremonies that would have led to a painful execution, he has been probably been placed in one of the dungeons of Toledo. Letting the fear set back into his mind,

The aim of the story is to simply create a dark atmosphere of apprehensive and anticipatory terror, and Poe is able to achieve this by tracking the path of our unnamed narrator's thoughts and experiences. Though the narrator is, like most of Poe's first-person protagonists, somewhat unreliable in nature, his unreliability is merely circumstantial, coming from the fear and the horror of what is going on around him, not the obsession that is usually present in the other narrators of Poe's literature. Due to the fact that the narrator is very much aware of his unreliability and affirms it to the reader in a way that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" would not, he gives us a sense of trust because of the fact that he is not someone who would deceive. The sense of honesty conveyed by the narrator leads to an intensity of the mood because the reader is able to trust the

Just as we talked about in class, he describes enough to get the message across, but he lets our imagination roam free. But just as he meticulously tracks the psychological journey of the narrator, the author never describes the wrongdoings of the narrator or the details of his arrest. This omission of these vital facts has two massive effects on the reader. First, it leads the reader to strongly identify with the narrator's disorientation and fear of the unknown. A main source of the protagonist's terror is that he either has no information on what is about to happen to him or knows exactly what is going to happen to him but the knowledge alone can do nothing to save him. Poe exploits the theme of the fear of the unknown by connecting it to the fear of the dark and to the fear of being helpless, as in the latter half of the