After reading a fair number of Poe's tales, I can affirm without any doubt that this one is my favorite. The start of the story is disorientating; we can guess that the narrator is a criminal awaiting the outcome of his trial. The verdict is not really favorable, so our narrator feels dizzy, passes out and wakes up in a dark room. In the little chamber, we can find a ‘nice’ unfathomable pit and a deadly blade-ornamented pendulum hanging from the ceiling, which is slowly swinging down to bury its sharp blade into our narrator’s chest. The religious symbolic power of our monastic torture chamber is pretty strong, as you may have guessed by now. We can think of the pendulum as the mortal inevitability of time, which will always outlive our frail human bodies and, literally, decompose them. Now that we’ve talked about our nice pendulum, let’s take a few words to describe the pit. The pit clearly is of a respectable depth, from what can be gathered from our narrator’s test, has a sinister appearance, and isn’t really …show more content…
The story gets us to think deeply about the deep reflection powers hidden into our unconscious (and yeah the pun was intended). Our prisoner is able to dodge the pendulum by concocting unconsciously a nice little plan, but his troubles are not over yet. The room gets super-hot and starts to shrink (some crazy inventive bastards those monks, huh?); our hero gets saved in extremis by the French troops and his nightmare is finally over. This last point made me ponder about why Poe chose to portray the French army as saviors; the historical context might shed some light on this particular point. The story is set in Spain, in the inquisition (a great purgatory created by the roman church to suppress heretics); the French, in the Napoleonian era, were the ones to free Spain from the inquisition and are, therefore, pictured as heroes in our