Pit And The Pendulum Setting

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Edgar Allen Poe once wrote, “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”. In many of Poe’s books, there are unreliable narrators and sometimes you cannot tell if they are dead or alive. This is especially true for Poe’s book “The Pit and the Pendulum”. “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allen Poe is a horror story because the setting is very spooky, it is very suspenseful, and the reader cares more about the plot than the character. One element of horror that is in “The Pit and the Pendulum” is setting. At the beginning the narrator describes his confinement as “The blackness of eternal night”(Pg, 6). The narrator also describes it as a tomb. When the prison cell was visible the character saw fiend and skeleton like figures on the walls. This evidence proves that “The Pit and the Pendulum” has an eerie and …show more content…

First the character speculates weather to open his eyes and is afraid of what he will see. When the character actually takes a glance he can't see anything and is horrified by how dark it is. Another moment of suspense is when the character falls and is dangerously close to the edge of a circular pit. There is also suspense because the pendulum is slowly swinging down on the character. The final moment of suspense is when the walls are closing in on the character and are going to make him fall down the pit. These things make “The Pit and the Pendulum have a lot of suspense. In “The Pit and the Pendulum” the reader cares more about the plot than the character. The reader does not know the character’s name, but wants to know how the character dies. When the pendulum swings over the character the reader wants to know if the pendulum is going to kill him or not. The reader does not care if the pendulum kills the character. These reasons tell why the reader cares more about the plot then the

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