Commentary on a Passage from Edgar Allan Poe's "the Pit and the Pendulum"

The eerie passage is an extract from one of Edgar Allan Poe's ominous works, The Pit and the Pendulum. The unnamed narrator is found guilty by the Spanish Inquisition and moreover is sentenced to death - and not just an ordinary death but rather to suffer a gradual, maddening torment. He is thrown into a dungeon and when he wakes up, he finds himself in one of the Spanish Inquisition's games of death - a pitch black pit.

The passage is told from a first person point-of-view. Being a horror story, the use of the first-person point of view achieves a certain effect: the readers are able to put themselves in the narrator's shoes effortlessly in order to experience Poe's macabre tale firsthand. When the narrator gains consciousness, he claims:

"Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound --the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch --a tingling sensation pervading my frame."

The narrator regains his natural senses. At this, the readers' involvement in the plot is enhanced and strengthened. Since the readers would feel as though they are the narrator himself, they would eventually get a solid grasp of everything that occurs in the pit - from the stench of the dark waters to the resonating beat of the heart. Poe uses the element of senses quite outstandingly and effectively in order to greatly influence the minds of his readers. Throughout the passage, the narrator gives sensory details. These enable Poe to play with the readers' emotion, and more importantly, fear, in order to deliver the plot the way it is supposed to be - terrifyingly. As a result, readers of The Pit and the Pendulum are able to imagine the setting easily.

Along with the use of senses, Poe utilizes a literary device that allows his readers to experience the horror of The Pit and the Pendulum more profoundly - imagery.

"The blackness of eternal night encompassed me."

The narrator's fears were confirmed as he unveiled his eyes; the accursed pit was enveloped in an everlasting darkness which no ray of light could pierce. Being a horror story in nature, Poe uses imagery to build the setting of the pit in order to effectively evoke tension among his readers. As the readers learn more about the pit, they begin to grasp the true situation - that there is no way out, and no hope of finding one. Poe's use of imagery tremendously heightens the fear of his readers as the setting is described by the use of strings of adjectives.

"I reached out my hand and it fell heavily upon something damp and hard."

Throughout the passage, an eerie and sinister atmosphere surrounds the whole pit. Wherever the narrator wanders off to, there is that presence of the unknown that pervades the black pit. He