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“The Pit and the Pendulum” is distinct among Poe’s first-person narrations. Unlike the hypersensitive characters from other stories, such as Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” this narrator claims to lose the capacity of sensation during the swoon that opens the story. He thus highlights his own unreliability in ways that other narrators resist or deny. Upon describing his possible loss of sensation, though, the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” proceeds to convey the sensory details that he previously claims are beyond him. The narrative pattern resembles that of other stories, such as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” to the extent that the narrator says and does the opposite of what he originally announces. This story diverges from the pattern, however, in that this narrator’s descriptions are more objectively valid—that is, less concerned with proving the narrator’s own sanity than with relaying and accounting for the elements of his incarceration. The story is also unusual among Poe’s tales because it is hopeful. Hope is manifest in the story not only in the rescue that resolves the tale, but also in the tale’s narrative strategy. The narrator maintains the capacity to recount faithfully and rationally his surroundings while also describing his own emotional turmoil. Unlike in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” for example, the burden of emotional distress does not hinder storytelling.
“The Pit and the Pendulum” also stands out as one of Poe’s most historically specific tales. Poe counteracts the placelessness of a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher” with the historical context of the Inquisition and its religious politics. This historical frame fills in for a personal history of the narrator. We do not know the specific circumstances of his arrest, nor are we given any arguments for his innocence or explanation for the barbarous cruelty of the Inquisitors. Poe’s description of the pendulum blade’s descent toward the narrator’s heart is extremely graphic, but Poe uses the portrayal of explicit violence to create a suspenseful story rather than to condemn the Inquisition. The tale suggests a political agenda only implicitly. Poe does not critique the ideological basis of the tale’s historical context. The narrative examines the physical and emotional fluctuations of the pure present, leaving historical and moral judgments to us. “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a traditional Poe story that breaks from Poe’s conventions: violent yet ultimately hopeful, graphic yet politically allusive.
In the 1840 preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of his short stories, Poe describes his authorial goal of “unity of design.” In “The Philosophy of Composition,” which was written three years after “The Pit and the Pendulum,” he proclaims that the ideal short story must be short enough to be read at a single sitting. Moreover, he argues that all elements of a work of fiction should be crafted toward a single, intense effect. These critical theories merge in “The Pit and the Pendulum”; this short tale ruminates, at every moment, on the horror of its punishments without actually requiring that they be performed. Stripped of extraneous detail, the story focuses on what horror truly is: not the physical pain of death, but the terrible realization that a victim has no choice but to die. Whether the narrator chooses to jump into the pit or get sliced in half by the pendulum, he faces an identical outcome—death.
The horror of this lack of choice is the effect for which everything in the story strives. The story, however, holds out hope by demonstrating that true resolve when what someone chooses to do seems most impossible. When threatened by the pendulum, the narrator does not succumb to the swooning of his senses. He recruits his rational capacities and uses the hungry rats for his own benefit. In this way, the narrator resembles a character like C. Auguste Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” who can separate himself from the emotional overload of a situation and put himself in a position to draw rational conclusions.
