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Symbolism In Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit And The Pendulum

1179 Words5 Pages

Symbolic essay of the Pit and the Pendulum Symbols can deepen the symbolic meaning of a story, this is exquisitely portrayed in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. At the beginning of the story, the narrator finds himself being sentenced by an Inquisitorial court, shortly after, he wakes up in a dungeon drugged and started to determine the dimensions of the dungeon. He then falls but is able to bypass a large pit in the middle of the dungeon. In addition, he finds a sharp pendulum hanging over him dropping slowly, driving him to near madness. Towards the end, the raw food which his captives had given him helps to draw rats to the narrator and gnaw away the bonds on the contraption he was tied to. In the end, as the pendulum is close to the narrator, he rubs the rotten food on the rope so the rats can chew through it. When the pendulum finally drops the rats save him just in time, freeing him from the ropes. Just as he thought it was over, the walls start closing in on the …show more content…

Symbolism is utilized throughout the Pit and the Pendulum, illustrating the unpleasantness of life, social structures of society, and vileness of human nature. Poe symbolizes the unpleasantness in his short story by using the pit, which portrays the evil in the world because it can be a representation of hell, in a religious point of view, “I now saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I had escaped. A step farther before my fall, and the world had seen me no more (poe).” This quote is a representation of hell as it talks about how the world could not see him anymore, much like hell which is perceived to be deep underneath the world where no one can find or see it. He also uses the Spanish Inquisition, which was a punishment to non- catholics, and if they were found not to

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