The Pit and the Pendulum
Analysis
One notable aspect of Edgar Allan Poe's prose is his consistent use of detailed description, and he uses this tendency to great effect in his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum." The aim of the story is very simply to create a dark atmosphere of foreboding and anticipatory horror, and Poe achieves this by minutely tracking the path of the unnamed narrator's thoughts and experiences. Although the narrator is, like most of Poe's first-person protagonists, somewhat unreliable in nature, his unreliability is circumstantial, stemming from his fear and physical weakness rather than from guilt or inherent madness. However, because the narrator is very much aware of his unreliability and emphasizes it to us in a way that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" would not, he paradoxically gives us the sense that he is not trying to deceive. The sense of emotional honesty conveyed by the narrator leads to a sense of increased immediacy in the story and intensity of the mood.
Despite the lurid descriptions and the account of a relatively reliable narrator, Poe excludes certain details that heighten the suspense of the story. Just as he carefully tracks the psychological wanderings of the narrator, the author does not describe the wrongdoing of the narrator or the details of his arrest and later of his salvation. This omission of the facts has two major effects on the reader. First, it leads us to identify strongly with the narrator's confusion and fear of the unknown. One of the main sources of the protagonist's terror is that he either knows nothing about what will happen to him or knows the exact nature of his fate but cannot do anything with his knowledge. Poe exploits the theme of the fear of the unknown by connecting it to the fear of the dark at the beginning of the narrator's ordeal and to the fear of being helpless, as in the latter half of the story.
The second effect of our lack of information concerning the narrator's trial and sentencing is that we
One notable aspect of Edgar Allan Poe's prose is his consistent use of detailed description, and he uses this tendency to great effect in his short story "The Pit and the Pendulum." The aim of the story is very simply to create a dark atmosphere of foreboding and anticipatory horror, and Poe achieves this by minutely tracking the path of the unnamed narrator's thoughts and experiences. Although the narrator is, like most of Poe's first-person protagonists, somewhat unreliable in nature, his unreliability is circumstantial, stemming from his fear and physical weakness rather than from guilt or inherent madness. However, because the narrator is very much aware of his unreliability and emphasizes it to us in a way that the narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" would not, he paradoxically gives us the sense that he is not trying to deceive. The sense of emotional honesty conveyed by the narrator leads to a sense of increased immediacy in the story and intensity of the mood.
Despite the lurid descriptions and the account of a relatively reliable narrator, Poe excludes certain details that heighten the suspense of the story. Just as he carefully tracks the psychological wanderings of the narrator, the author does not describe the wrongdoing of the narrator or the details of his arrest and later of his salvation. This omission of the facts has two major effects on the reader. First, it leads us to identify strongly with the narrator's confusion and fear of the unknown. One of the main sources of the protagonist's terror is that he either knows nothing about what will happen to him or knows the exact nature of his fate but cannot do anything with his knowledge. Poe exploits the theme of the fear of the unknown by connecting it to the fear of the dark at the beginning of the narrator's ordeal and to the fear of being helpless, as in the latter half of the story.
The second effect of our lack of information concerning the narrator's trial and sentencing is that we