‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum’’ is the most unique of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories in that it has a happy ending. The narrator has been imprisoned in a booby-trapped dungeon and sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition. He successfully escapes both the pit and the pendulum, only to be threatened by the superheated…
Tag: The United States of America
The Pit and the Pendulum – Analysis
Poe was controversial in his day. During his lifetime he was more popular as a literary critic than as a fiction writer and poet. Yet even in the 1840s his stories were published and talked about. He was credited with popularizing the short story as a literary format, and his invention of detective fiction won…
The Pit and the Pendulum – Setting – Historical Context
The Spanish Inquisition By the time Poe wrote ‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’’ the Spanish Inquisition was over. The Inquisition began in 1478 as a way to punish Jews and Muslims who had converted to Roman Catholicism rather than having been born into it. Thousands of people were put on trial, pronounced guilty, and sentenced…
The Pit and the Pendulum – Literary Devices – Gothic Elements – Point of View
Gothic Fiction Gothic fiction is characterized by a preoccupation with death, mystery, decay, madness, and terror. Gothic writers strive to stir the reader’s emotions, be it a feeling of the sublime or horror. The gothic tradition began in England around 1764, when Horace Walpole published his novel The Castle of Otranto, which concerns a doomed…
The Pit and the Pendulum – Themes – Sensory Details – Judges
Sensory Perception Poe’s goal in ‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum’’ is to create a mood of terror and despair through language. The narrator is condemned to death, and the entire story (save for the last paragraph) focuses on his reaction to this death sentence as it is slowly carried out. The mood is achieved in…
The Pit and the Pendulum – Characters
Inquisitors The Inquisitors only appear as black-robed, whitelipped judges in the story’s first scene, yet they play an important role as the narrator’s nemeses. They represent pure evil, although historically the tribunals of the Inquisition believed they were on God’s side. They represent an omniscient force in the story, watching the narrator’s every move and…
The Pit and the Pendulum – Summary
‘‘The Pit and the Pendulum’’ begins with the narrator sentenced to death by a panel of judges from the Spanish Inquisition. The unnamed narrator is consumed by his fragile mental condition and dreamlike state of consciousness. He does not mention his crime or whether he is really guilty. He does not hear the judges’ words,…
Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket – Analysis
Jack Finney’s third story to see print in 1956 was the outstanding suspense tale, ‘‘Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket,’’ which appeared in the October 26, 1956 issue of Collier’s. This was to be Jack Finney’s last story in Collier’s, where his first published work had appeared in 1947. The magazine, which had been founded…
Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket – Exposition – Essay
Much of Finney’s body of work addresses the thematic concern of time. Indeed, The Third Level, the volume that includes ‘‘Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket,’’ has many stories about time and time travel. The opening story, ‘‘The Third Level,’’ for example, concerns a man who finds a third level at Grand Central Station, one…
Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket – Setting
The Cold War The explosions of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, brought World War II to an end, and the rapid growth of the Soviet Union’s military power and ambition cast a pall over the Western world, including the United States, in the post-war years. The Cold War is a term used…