Pit and the Pendulum
“The Pit and the Pendulum” authored by Edgar Allan Poe, came into existence as a book in 1983. It is one of the first psychological thrillers, the genre being horror and thrill. The speaker tells the story of his involvement in a jail cell because of the Spanish Inquisition while his tormentors attempt different, horrible techniques to put him to death. Poe composed the short story about 20 years prior to the Civil War; even then, he efficiently described the terror associated with war and its consequences among the common people. The story depicts the fear of human beings and the fear of death inculcated among the masses. It is a journey of a person aimed at discovering his own soul (Lirola, 2009).
Terror thrives through the inculcation of fear in the subjects creating a source of authority and control that the terror perpetrators own and use to have their way in their actions. The fear associated with death creates a win situation for the terrorists, which they suppress, and embrace hence their courage and source of strength. In the book, Poe describes the fear of death in relation to war, yet revolving around aspects of terror that have come to life in the current world. The details of the discussion below detail this fear and that of the inquisition.
The narrator here is a victim of ‘Inquisition’. The lexicon meaning of Inquisition is judicial inquiry. Poe has described the fear of inquisition, among the common people during the civil war through this story, which shows that he was well ahead of his era. The fear of death or of the unknown is a dominant theme present in Poe’s short story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’.
The story is about an ailing person who is “sick — sick unto death,” and has been arrested during the civil war. The person very well knows that his days are numbered and he is afraid of his fate. He faces a panel of judges who punish him. Leading to his imprisonment and being placed into a cell. While being placed in the cell, the author has portrayed the condition of the man through the imagery of seven lighted candles. The candles inside the trial room are compared to “white angels,” “angel forms, with heads of flame,” till they “sank into nothingness,” and the blackness of obscurity supervened ( Ljungquist, 1978). The metaphorical expression of the candles and the cell aims at drawing the picture of the man in the cell, the life he lived and the fears that filled his days. Despite knowing his time would soon come to an end as day and night went by, he still held the fear of that particular day when his fate would come to reality. The fear that his death was coming soon was on his mind entirely, he contemplated on it regularly. His fears escalated by the numerous attempts by the captors who tried to cause his death. Each incendent looked like his demise with the candles providing solace that he only found within him. The lighted candles provided the hope of the man, but unfortunately along with the candles, his hope also melted away and he was punished.
The candles departure felt like foreshadowing his own demise. This is a psychological condition, which Poe has portrayed in a very scientific manner. This phobia occurs due to fear of any kind. In this case, it was the fear of death as well as uncertainty of the unknown at large. Throughout the story, we find that often the narrator becomes unconscious. Poe wanted to highlight a connection between reality and trance through this particular act of the narrator. His unconscious mind is a way to his subconscious self.. According to Leo Spitzer, Poe has used the aesthetic conjunction of light and dark imagery in most of his novels and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ is no exception ( Ljungquist, 1978). Poe’s great work ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ also portrays a narrator who has no name. Through these unnamed narrators, Poe wants to merge the identity of the commoners with his characters. Like the ‘Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ also belongs to the genre of horror. Being a psychological thriller, the ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ strikes a chord between the psyche of the narrator as well as the reader. The reader feels the psychological punch whenever the narrator faces something terrible. It is really a masterpiece by the author as he could capture something as delicate as well as intense as the human psyche in the 18th century.
Another strong imagery highlighted throughout the story is ‘blackness’. The author has purposely repeated the term ‘blackness’ in order to show the degraded souls of human beings as it was witnessed during the civil war, 20 years after Poe’s writing. Mankind without the virtues of honesty, love and compassion is nothing but ‘black’. Along with the speaker’s conflict with blackness, “The Pit and the Pendulum” contains other essentials, which are seen in gothic form of literature in general — A form of fragmentation or lack of orientation from material substances and an obscure line of difference that exists between the trance and the conscious self of the speaker. These things are also discussed in Burke’s ‘Enquiry’. In the words of Burke, the splendor of darkness affects all humankind. “For in utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves. . .” (Ljungquist, 1978).The speaker’s perilous closeness to the pit and doubtful position with regard to nearby things is a kind of confirmation to Burke’s common explanation of man’s dilemma in entire obscurity. At a number of points, the speaker loses consciousness and becomes sleepy only to get up to more obsessive and more terrifying feelings.
For detailed study of Poe’s literary works, I have used Poe’s letters written to his relatives and friends. From his letter written to his aunt Muddy we come to know that as a person Poe was very detail oriented. In his letter, Poe had meticulously kept the record of every monetary transaction he made and he wrote even about the color of the stone steps and the pillars of his cottage where he was supposed to stay (Knowing Poe, 2002). The orientation to detail gives him the approach that ensures the audience gets involved in the story in a manner that promotes his writing skills. This approach to literature combined with the metaphorical approach provides an edge of Poe’s works over those of many other writers.
In a poem of Poe, we find him as a romantic person who is again analytical in his approach. Poe dedicated a poem to his female friend Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood in a particular manner. Her name was present in the poem in a manner that placed the first letter of her name as the first letter of the first line of the poem. The second letter was the second letter of the second line of the poem, so on and so forth (Knowing Poe, 2002). These provide the relationship or consideration that Poe had for her. Critics have always found out Poe’s writing enchanting because of his hypnotic style and his analytical as well as descriptive approach. In most of the story, Poe describes something fearful, thrilling and terrific in his own way, which in turn captivates the readers.
In ‘Pit and the Pendulum’ Poe describes this thrill and terror from another point of view, which is the psychological point. Unlike Coleridge Poe does not belong to the dreamland, away from reality. Poe’s works are greatly realistic if we can interpret them appropriately. In ‘Pit and the pendulum’ the pit can be compared with our destiny which can change when it is least expected to be. The pendulum is the representation of death, which is the only reality that human beings confront at some point of time. Death is inevitable and the only constant that makes everything else unbalanced. According to a journal by ‘American association of critical care nurses’, the narrator of the short story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ was facing all those symptoms which are associated with heart attack, a physical ailment. Today medical science has advanced a lot and therefore these symptoms of heart attacks can be recognized and treated. This support device meant for patients suffering from weak hearts is called ‘ventricular assist devices’, commonly known as ‘VADs’ (American Association of Nurses, 2009). It gives us sufficient reasons to believe that Poe was aware of such mental conditions, which are now being revealed by medical science. In other words Poe was well ahead of his time and unusually modern in his thinking.
Summing up all the discussions, we conclude that death is a theme much discussed in every phase of life. According to our primary, as well as secondary sources, we get to know that death as occurred in Poe’s writing creates fear in man and makes us believe into something positive. Death does not mean the end of everything it can also mean a new beginning as we can see in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’. The narrator escaped his fear of death and embraced a new life. Poe has successfully written about the rays of light that exists at the end of the tunnel in this case at the end of ‘the pit’. A happy ending of a story teaches us to trust ourselves. Finally, it can be noted that the fear of death is a major theme fundamentally linking the majority of the works of Poe.
References
American Association of Nurses. (2009). Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Ventricular Assist Devices Retrieved from http://ccn.aacnjournals.org/content/29/6/29.full.pdf
Knowing Poe. (2002). Primary Source Documents. Retrieved from http://knowingpoe.thinkport.org/library/source_life.asp#aunt
Lirola, M.M. (2009). Functional characteristics of some processes of thematization and postponement in two short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe. Retrieved from http://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/16228/1/Licus09Poe.pdf
Ljungquist, K (1978). Burke’s Enquiry and the Aesthetics of
“The Pit and the Pendulum” Retrieved from http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1978202.htm
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