"Pit and The Pendulum" Poe

The story itself has a very eery and sick feeling to it, almost to the point where I literally felt tension in the pit of my stomach. Larger part of that consists of the talk of death and process of death. In the beginning he is talking about how he is listening to his sentence of death. "The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears." (Poe) The sadness in the part pours out of the words. The idea of death and almost mourning of the fact of him losing his life is very much a dark romanticism quality. Mourning especially is a large part of dark romanticism because it gives a very dark and eery side to the idea of the nature and happy romanticism period. The idea of mystery then plays a huge part throughout the rest the poem because you are questioning whether he is still alive, dying, or just dead. A little later he defines slightly what he could feel was happening "Then silence, and stillness, night were the universe. I had swooned ; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost." (Poe) Even here though he still keeps the dark romanticism theme of the fact that there is still a mystery on whether his state is alive or dead. Another very largely uses characteristic that Poe uses in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the idea of a subconscious mind and dreaming. This is largely uses concept because it stays consistent with the imaginary aspect of romanticism writings. Charles E. May says in his criticism about Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum” that “Focusing on a character under sentence of death and aware of it, it moves the character into a concrete dilemma that seems to "stand for" a metaphysical situation in an ambiguous way that suggests its "dreamy," "indeterminate" nature. In this story we find the most explicit statement in Poe's fiction of his sense of the blurry line between dream and reality.” (May). This means that he is basically saying that Poe likes to exaggerate the things that happen in this dream like state. These are the times when we aren’t truly here nor are we truly anywhere else either. The idea is very dark romanticism because it again gives mystery and depth to any story. The “Pit and the Pendulum” is a prime example because of how it talks about his time in which he is not quite dead nor is he alive, but truly he has absolutely no idea which one he really is. There is a time within the story when he begins to almost become happy about the idea of dying and that is when he begins to come back to “real” life. Talking much of the idea of madness or loss of control in his mind he describes this time of feeling like he were dyeing with many of the dark romanticism qualities that Poe was so very good at.

May, Charles E. "Alternate Realms of Reality." In Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 96–97. Quoted as "Dreams and Reality in the Story" in Harold Bloom, ed. Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1998. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= BMSSEP39&SingleRecord=True (accessed January 19, 2012).


Poe, Edgar. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 97-99. Print.