Pain: physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury. Fear: a mixed feeling of dread and reverence. Death: Ceasing to live or exist. These words have few direct connections; however pain, fear and death all give a sense of time and act as links to reality. Many people can easily lose their sense of time and reality like in the Pit and the Pendulum. Some people believe, because for most of the story the narrator’s unaware of reality, the narrator doesn’t actually experience any of the tortures that he describes; however, Poe displays these anchors to reality during the torture. Thus the narrator of the Pit and the Pendulum does experience the tortures he described because they were his only links to reality and sense of time. In
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This is shown by the amount of fear given towards death and how he finally sees the reality of his death approach getting closer and closer through a time he can properly see now. His fear of the reality he just found is seen when he’s panicking about being pushed into the pit, saying “oh! horror!—oh! any horror but this!” while he gets pushed closer to falling into the pit (pg 11). This is showing the fear of death by falling in the pit and his grasp of reality that he’s fated to fall in it. Also he starts to see time because as he gets closer to the pit he describes it as “The fearful difference quickly increased with a low rumbling or moaning sound” (pg 12). Instead of questioning whether or not it's going quickly or if it’s just in his head the narrator knows time is moving at a rapid pace. He knows this because his death is getting closer and he finally has a grasp on reality tight enough know. The narrator when he first realizes that the walls closing in while on fire he states that “the lurid lustre of a fire [even he] could not force [his] imagination to regard as unreal”, this is showing that even he knows that finally his cognitive sense has grasped reality and the walls are apart of that reality (pg 11). Comparatively, this shows a fear of death anchoring him to reality because the
This is shown by the amount of fear given towards death and how he finally sees the reality of his death approach getting closer and closer through a time he can properly see now. His fear of the reality he just found is seen when he’s panicking about being pushed into the pit, saying “oh! horror!—oh! any horror but this!” while he gets pushed closer to falling into the pit (pg 11). This is showing the fear of death by falling in the pit and his grasp of reality that he’s fated to fall in it. Also he starts to see time because as he gets closer to the pit he describes it as “The fearful difference quickly increased with a low rumbling or moaning sound” (pg 12). Instead of questioning whether or not it's going quickly or if it’s just in his head the narrator knows time is moving at a rapid pace. He knows this because his death is getting closer and he finally has a grasp on reality tight enough know. The narrator when he first realizes that the walls closing in while on fire he states that “the lurid lustre of a fire [even he] could not force [his] imagination to regard as unreal”, this is showing that even he knows that finally his cognitive sense has grasped reality and the walls are apart of that reality (pg 11). Comparatively, this shows a fear of death anchoring him to reality because the