The Pit And The Pendulum Rhetorical Analysis

With closed eyes, senses of perception, direction, vision, have been stripped away. Poe’s rhetoric remains, the sole survivor of complete sensory deprivation. With his writing techniques, a prevalent exigence is born: Poe aims to convey the effects of pessimistic reasoning on physicality. Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” portrays the ultimate desolation and revival of thought-processes, emphasizing catalysts of mood, legato, diction. Poe establishes the mood within the story’s first moments: moribund, anguished, sightless. With the narrator’s preambulatory statements, the pessimism is divulged, “[sickness] unto death with long agony… [he] felt [his] senses were leaving [him]” (62). This agony expresses the story’s initial shadow of darkness; the reader is grasped by the stormy tendrils of failure. However, Poe’s introduction, of this stormy mood, is …show more content…
Poe impedes the advance of the quick tempo; demanding its deceleration. When Poe decelerates this tempo, it furthermore affects the story’s tranquility, portraying the narrator’s ascension into optimism. This is shown when the narrator exclaims, “I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble”(69). This description, compared to a child entranced, by an ornament, portrays the narrator’s optimism; the scintillating surface of the bauble is positive, enlightening, optimistic. By introducing vibrant diction (which strays from the previous, adverse diction), Poe prompts a question: what persuades the narrator to think differently? While the character ascends into optimism, the mood is directly affected, as Poe has previously established an apodictic link, between the narrator and the mood. Poe’s diction assists in proving his exigence; impacting a sphere of influence within his story, rather than a small element of