The Pit and the Pendulum

“And then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help.” 

In this vivid passage, the narrator illustrates one of the deeper cruelties of fear: his terror also robs him of the power of his imagination. The candles, which might have been a symbol of heavenly consolation, become inert, uncaring objects in the light of his torment.

“He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.”

The narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” draws a strong connection between death, unconsciousness, and dreams. Fainting, he insists, isn’t truly unconsciousness. Rather, it’s a way of coming into contact with a spiritual reality outside daily existence—one that feeds the poetic imagination. Unfortunately, a poetic imagination is a terrible thing to have when you’re about to be subjected to torture.

“I longed, but dared not, to employ my vision. I dreaded the first glance at objects around me. It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see.” 

As the imprisoned narrator awakes, his worst nightmare isn’t that he’ll see something horrible, but that he’ll see nothing. This vision of horror speaks to a deeper dread of eternal nothingness, gestured at in the narrator’s earlier reflections on unconsciousness. Believing deeply that there’s some spiritual world beyond our own, the speaker is here trapped in an encounter with what feels like utter nothingness while he’s alive and conscious.

“[M]y chin rested upon the floor of the prison, but my lips, and the upper portion of my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than the chin, touched nothing. At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy vapor, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose to my nostrils. I put forward my arm and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit, whose extent, of course, I had no means of ascertaining at the moment. Groping about the masonry just below the margin, I succeeded in dislodging a small fragment, and let it fall into the abyss. For many seconds I hearkened to its reverberations as it dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent; at length, there was a sullen plunge into water, succeeded by loud echoes.” 

The narrator’s discovery of the terrible pit is a good example of Poe’s meticulous, second-by-second tracking of his narrator’s experience. Buried in a dark and treacherous tomb, the speaker registers each thought and movement. This effect suggests the slow build of dawning horror—a creeping crescendo of anxiety.

“In other conditions of mind, I might have had courage to end my misery at once, by a plunge into one of these abysses; but now I was the veriest of cowards. Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits—that the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.”

The narrator’s torture isn’t just to feel pain, but to anticipate pain. The darkness that surrounds him suggests his suffocating anxiety. Alone in the dark, he’s free to imagine the worst. Allowing rumors about their tortures to spread might have been the canniest thing the Inquisition of this story could have done: Half the narrator’s torture is in having a half-formed idea of sufferings that he can embellish with his own worst nightmares.

“In feeling my way I had found many angles, and thus deduced an idea of great irregularity; so potent is the effect of total darkness upon one arousing from lethargy or sleep! The angles were simply those of a few slight depressions, or niches, at odd intervals. The general shape of the prison was square.” 

Part of the horror of the narrator’s imprisonment is its uncertainty. Even the few facts he thinks he can make out about his prison in the dark are misleading. This is a metaphor for a common human experience: A lot of the time, we think we know a lot more than we really do!

“I now observed—with what horror it is needless to say—that [the pendulum’s] nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.” 

The narrator’s sharp sensory attention enhances the grotesque, gothic horror of the pendulum—campily tricked out as Father Time’s scythe. After days of sensory deprivation in the dark, the narrator’s senses are on high alert. The sinister “hiss” of the swinging blade, more than its looks, is what makes things really nasty here.

“I prayed—I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.” 

The narrator’s brief moment of insane calm as the pendulum descends emphasizes how terror and suffering wear away at people’s humanity. Here, the narrator becomes like a child staring at a toy, totally detached from the horror of his situation. There’s something not just childlike, but animal about this, as if he’s a rabbit going limp in the jaws of a fox.

“Down—certainly, relentlessly down! It vibrated within three inches of my bosom! I struggled violently—furiously—to free my left arm.” 

As the narrator’s torment heightens, so does Poe’s punctuation. When the pendulum is within a few inches of the narrator’s chest, the sentences fill up with dashes and exclamation points, making the prose feel as frantic and desperate as its speaker. The next paragraph lays it on even thicker, repeating, “Down—still unceasingly—still inevitably down!” This echo mirrors the steady, repetitive motion of the pendulum itself.

“Dreading to find my faint and, as it seemed, my last hope frustrated, I so far elevated my head as to obtain a distinct view of my breast. The surcingle enveloped my limbs and body close in all direction—save in the path of the destroying crescent.” 

The Inquisition’s cruelty isn’t just in concocting pains and shocks, but in raising and then dashing hopes. There would be no reason to tie a captive up with a single rope if one didn’t want him to go through exactly the thought process the narrator goes through here. Mental torture, this story suggests, is more severe and more sadistic than physical torture could ever be.

“They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips sought my own; I was half stifled by their thronging pressure; disgust, for which the world has no name, swelled my bosom, and chilled, with a heavy clamminess, my heart.” 

As the narrator waits for an obscene heap of rats to gnaw him free of his bindings, he gestures to the connection between mental and physical torment. Here, his disgust at the rats is so great that it becomes a sensation. The mental and the physical, this passage suggests, weave in and out of each other as closely as the dream world and the waking world.

“Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions, where none had been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.” 

When the blazing walls begin to close in on the narrator, he explicitly points out how thin the line between fantasy and reality is. The glowing eyes of the demons painted on the wall strike him as real and alive—and so they are, in a sense. The demons come to life with the malicious sadism of their inventors. Perhaps, this image suggests, dreams and the imagination are just another way of understanding reality—and one that tells a different kind of truth.

“I threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined its inmost recesses. Yet, for a wild moment, did my spirit refuse to comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length it forced—it wrestled its way into my soul—it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. Oh! for a voice to speak!—oh! horror!—oh! any horror but this! With a shriek, I rushed from the margin, and buried my face in my hands—weeping bitterly.” 

The narrator has never before held back from describing exactly what horrors he’s experiencing; observe the earlier passages about the swarming rats and the hissing pendulum for only two examples among many. His choice to hold back here is Poe’s masterpiece of psychological horror. Whatever he’s seeing in there, it’s the worst thing he can possibly imagine—so bad he can’t even describe it. We’re invited to project our own worst-possible-thing into that pit—and to realize that perhaps we can’t even fully imagine what the worst possible thing is, deepening the horror even further.