Pit and the Pendulum

In this story a man is punished for what sounds like is not his fault. When he wakes up after falling asleep he notices that he is in a dark room and is afraid that he is mistakenly locked in a tomb and burried alive. After some more investigation his worries are behind him because he learns that it is not a tomb, but a prison chamber. It is completely dark and he must trust himself and stay calm while figuring out his escape. Since he could not see anything in the dungeon he had to use other senses to find his way out. To my suprise he had some very ingenious ways to escape the deathly tricks in this cell.

This story is not a dark romanticism, but has more of a strong story line. Dark romanicisms typically are gloomy and have a sad ending to them like most of Poe's other writings. In this one though, an innocent man is saved when a French general and his army successfuly take over the prison and its inmates. Since this is a happy poem, I would classify it as a Romanicism because it is very romantic how he gets to go home to his family after being rescued by the french army. This man continues to show lots of bravery to continue to fight for survival after knowing he is going to die. His ways of escaping their tortue was very ingenious and unique. The story almost had a fairytale ending to it, except the man isn't a princess.

When the man is strapped onto the table and is looking at the ceiling, I find it ironic that there is a clock painted there and that it is visible to every person that has been killed on that table. It must be another form of torture by antagonizing the prisoners. It basically meant "haha you can see your way out and cant get out and its only a matter of TIME untill you die and no one knows your here :)". That didnt matter though because this man continued to fight through and ended up surviving the fatal pendulum. When the walls started to come in, he knew he was going to die. He must have prepared mentally before and was ready to fall into the pit when the hero of the story came to his rescue and snatched him up before he fell in.

I like this story for many reasons, but the main one was how interesting it was. I also liked the fact that it isn't a dark romanicism and something horrible happened in it. I would like to explore more of Edgar Allan Poe's works throughout our class and see how many others I can find that are not dark romanticisms. I hope that more of Poe's short stories are this interesting and not like some of his poems. I also predict that Danny will be content with this story since he too hates being put in a gloomy mood by dark romanicisms.



Poe, Edgar Allan. "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. 263-273. Print.