Pit And The Pendulum Essay

In Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, he strived to strike fear into the reader's hearts. The prisoner faces psychological torture from the inquisitors who are keeping him captive, as a part of his death sentence due to religious heresy. Throughout the story, Poe creates a feeling of fear through a reliable first person narrator who acknowledges his demise in Poe's most historically aware story.
The narrator is disparate from other narrators, as he is reliable and uses his mental capabilities to compensate for his lack of physical ability, whereas in other stories the narrator is mentally unstable and designated as unreliable. The reader experiences the horrors, just as the prisoner experiences it, but the narrator uses canny tactics, such as "[tearing] a part of the hem from the rob and [placing it]", and then he "counted fifty-two paces" before he swooned "and upon resuming [his] walk [he] had counted forty-eight more when [he] arrived at the rag, using the rag to measure out the size of the dungeon. Also, when he was tied down and the pendulum was about to hit him, he took “the particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained, [and] thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever [he] could reach it" so that the rats could …show more content…
In this story, the narrator realizes that he had been sentenced to "death with its most hideous moral horrors". The inquisitors' methods start to take effect when the prisoner says, "In other conditions of mind I might have had courage to end my misery at once by a plunge into one of these abysses; but now I was the veriest of cowards", showing that he was a coward and acknowledges his slow and calamitous eradication. As the story progresses, the narrator's mental state deteriorates as "upon recovering, [he] at once started to [his] feet, trembling convulsively in every fibre", showing that he was mentally