Tim Carter
ENGL 1302
George Edwards
10 October, 2016
Cheating Death in The Pit and the Pendulum In 1480, Ferdinand II from Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, initiated the mass genocide that is commonly known today as the Spanish Inquisition. These two catholic monarchs decided that anything not catholic needed to be purged from society to live true Christian lives. This resolution then became the foundation for them to sentence people to death for not being catholic or supporting progressive ideas like humanism. Neighbors would bear false witness to the catholic authorities by claiming someone was not catholic to exact some form of revenge for the most trivial of reasons, all in all knowing they would be sentenced to some gruesome death. In …show more content…
Instead, Poe uses lots of sensory description and first hand emotions of fear, confusion, and helplessness to imply how he wants you to feel about the inquisition, all the while empathizing with those who lived through such involvements in history. Also, Poe was almost obsessed with death. The ideas surrounding the matter, peoples mental processes and emotions through experiencing or succumbing to death intrigued him. This is a well-known trait of Poe’s which was constantly expressed through his gloomy and twisted literature across the board. In this particular piece of literature, Poe strays a bit from his normal melancholy theme and slips in a little bit of hope. Although our narrator is aware of the terrors of the inquisition and wants to accept his fate, when he first comes to in his cell, instead of cowering in a corner to await death he gets up and explores his prison hoping for a way out. When he falls just short of the pit in the middle of the cell, it seems to give our prisoner confidence and reason to stay alive having cheated death by avoiding the pit. Also, after he has seemed to have lost all hope and awaits the impending doom of the pendulum, the narrator finds one last glimmer of hope and lures the rats to chew through his bindings, cheating death once more. Overall, Poe manages to bring a hopeful theme in with the terror of the situation while escaping any direct political themes toward the historical events of the
ENGL 1302
George Edwards
10 October, 2016
Cheating Death in The Pit and the Pendulum In 1480, Ferdinand II from Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, initiated the mass genocide that is commonly known today as the Spanish Inquisition. These two catholic monarchs decided that anything not catholic needed to be purged from society to live true Christian lives. This resolution then became the foundation for them to sentence people to death for not being catholic or supporting progressive ideas like humanism. Neighbors would bear false witness to the catholic authorities by claiming someone was not catholic to exact some form of revenge for the most trivial of reasons, all in all knowing they would be sentenced to some gruesome death. In …show more content…
Instead, Poe uses lots of sensory description and first hand emotions of fear, confusion, and helplessness to imply how he wants you to feel about the inquisition, all the while empathizing with those who lived through such involvements in history. Also, Poe was almost obsessed with death. The ideas surrounding the matter, peoples mental processes and emotions through experiencing or succumbing to death intrigued him. This is a well-known trait of Poe’s which was constantly expressed through his gloomy and twisted literature across the board. In this particular piece of literature, Poe strays a bit from his normal melancholy theme and slips in a little bit of hope. Although our narrator is aware of the terrors of the inquisition and wants to accept his fate, when he first comes to in his cell, instead of cowering in a corner to await death he gets up and explores his prison hoping for a way out. When he falls just short of the pit in the middle of the cell, it seems to give our prisoner confidence and reason to stay alive having cheated death by avoiding the pit. Also, after he has seemed to have lost all hope and awaits the impending doom of the pendulum, the narrator finds one last glimmer of hope and lures the rats to chew through his bindings, cheating death once more. Overall, Poe manages to bring a hopeful theme in with the terror of the situation while escaping any direct political themes toward the historical events of the