Pit And The Pendulum Torture

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” describes the torture experienced by someone during the Spanish Inquisition. After being sentenced to torture, the narrator slowly begins to make sense of their surroundings. Unfortunately, he finds himself in a dark dungeon and subject to torture including complete darkness, no escape apart from a deep pit in the center, extreme thirst, and the impending doom imposed by a swinging blade growing closer to his chest. As the narrator navigates these trials, he fights not only for his life, but for his sanity. Noriko Mizuta Lippit explains that this hero induces utmost terror and the pain of death through his imagination (228). The hero himself is a “method of inducing pain and ecstasy and of intoxicating …show more content…

As the irrationality spreads from his subconscious mind, it affects what he can understand rationally. Jennifer R. Bellengee explains that as the narrator experiences these horrors, he is subject to an “experience that eludes rational knowledge and communicability” (30). Poe has created a setting that pushes the boundaries of what we as humans can undergo or even fathom on both a physical and mental level. By pushing these boundaries, he taps into a new level of subconscious fears that seem irrational in everyday life, but in a new, absurd setting they seem more plausible. However, in this work, rationality still overcomes the irrational. Poe uses the symbols of the pit and the pendulum as representations of the subconscious and conscious mind, respectively. The pit stands as a symbol of the unknown. The narrator avoids the pit because it will lead to unknown suffering. Even when he has accepted his death, he still resists this unknown. This is symbolic of his resistance to letting his subconscious overwhelm him. The pendulum stands as a symbol of the conscious mind’s struggle against the

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