The Pit And The Pendulum Symbolism

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The Pit and the Pendulum:

Death, torture, and gut wrenching horror are all characteristics of the short story the Pit and the Pendulum. Written by Edgar Allen Poe in his waning years, the story has kind of a dark romanticism with evil giving it an eerie feeling. Poe wrote only a few more short stories afterward, and those stories were increasingly more gruesome. However, due to the descriptive language, this particular story leaves the reader with a dark feeling. Many aspects of Poe's stories after the Pit and the Pendulum involved some sort of torture and torment to either the protagonist or someone close to them. This story also utilizes a lot of symbolism. For example, one could view it as the suffering of one man at the hands of another. Then follow his progression into purgatory with the pendulum serving as his way to work off his sins. Followed by the turning point where eventually the protagonist rises into what one could imagine as heaven when the angelic French soldiers free him and show him the light while leaving the dungeon after an unknown amount of time. Although these are marvelous examples of symbolism in the story, Poe's use of another means to show symbolism seems more suited to the story itself. In The Pit and the Pendulum, the author uses torment and torture to depict the immorality of Spanish inquisitors, who maimed, tortured, and killed prisoners during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as the pits representation of hell.
The Spanish Inquisition, a ruthless force bent on total destruction of the all non-Catholics, reigned supreme from 1483 - 1813 and were represented as demons and murders in the story. Established by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, approved by Pope Sixtus IV. The purpose of the Spa...

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...h to make another person confess, mentioned before as being a mental torture. Passive torture however is basically mixture of both active torture and mental torture at time. Examples seen in the story would be starvation, dehydration, forcing you to hold water, and hang by your feet as the blood slowly drains to your head. The narrator would suffer on end day in to day out until his rescue from these atrocities carried out by the inquisitors in his pit, which in some terms can be compared to hell. In the beginning, the soldier describes going into the pit as “a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades” (Poe 268). With the inquisitors as the demons of hell this allusion could not be better because in the story it says “oh! Most unrelenting! Oh! Most demoniac of men!”(Poe 229), with the French soldiers acting as heroic angels that freed him from the darkness.

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