3DGAR AlLAN P03! PiT & THE PENDULUM !

Rosie Charles
Edgar Allan Poe
The Pit & the Pendulum
AP ENG III



The Pit & the Pendulum is the perfect name for this story. For one, those two items are the main aspects of the story. And two, with that title, readers don’t know what exactly to expect. This element of suspense and twist is the writing fashion of esteemed Edgar Allan Poe. But yet, in this particular story, Poe does something that is quite unusual in most of his other writings. While unusual, he strays toward the rhetoric triangle in a different type of way, while still using tactics that he always does.


The first thing I, as a reader, noticed was that the whole story was dark. This is exactly what I was expecting. Mostly all of Poe’s story are dark and evil, if I may say so myself. This type of writing is called Gothic writing. This was the exactly opposite side of the writing of the Romanticism era. I choose to characterize the story as gothic because, for one, the entire environment is inside an enclosed pit. The pit is dark, and dark! Also I choose gothic because of the sequence of events that took place in the story. Nothing about this story is happy, well besides the ending.


The ending! Edgar Allan Poe’s ending are always infamous. All his ending are sad, or evil. Mostly ending in death, or despair, or worse! This is where the appeal to pathos comes into play. In the story, the character/narrator lives. But before we find this out, he has hope. Hope is a quality in Poe’s writing that is basically non-existing. If the characters have hope, the narrator doesn’t, or vise versa. But since the narrator was the main character, readers are quite lost, as was I. Another appeal to pathos/emotion is this one particular quote: “And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death,”. I classify this under emotion because emotion has to do with mentality. And in this quote it seems as thought his mentality was shot! I believe he went a little crazy before his burst of hope came skipping along.


All of Poe’s stories have amazing imagery. And almost all of the very visual effects are of gruesome details in the work. In The Pit & the Pendulum, the breath-taking imagery took place with the pendulum. For example: “was formed of a crescent glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen of that of a razor.”. In this quote, a reader can see exactly what is being spoken of and exactly how it looks. Another example of imagery is this: “it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath”. While also being figurative language, the reader can see how close the pendulum really is to cutting the narrator.


Edgar Allan Poe’s the Pit & the Pendulum is one of his very best, in my eyes. It has a twist, like his entire writings do, but yet not in the way familiar readers of Poe’s expects to be “twisted”.