The Pit And The Pendulum Analysis

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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Through characters in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Masque of Red Death,” the true power of fear is illuminated upon. A prince who throws a ball in bloodshed, a man who kills for an eye, and a prisoner who longs for freedom; all the characters are plagued by their gnawing desperation. Spanning across three stories, Edgar Allen Poe uses literary devices including symbolism, irony, and repetition to shine light on the distortion of the mind caused by fear and its backlash.
A colour is never just a colour, and a number is never just a number --- that is the power of symbolism. In the “Masque of Red Death,” Prince Prospero’s eccentricity rises with his odd choice of …show more content…
Told in the view of a monomaniac, “The Tell-Tale Heart” shows a murderer that buckle under his guilt. The narrator finally breaks after moments of rising mania: “ ‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed!---tear up the planks!---here, here!---it is the beating of his hideous heart!’ “ (78). The narrator is initially calm when receiving policemen who had been alerted to the old man’s shriek, even offering them a tour around the deceased’s house. However, after moments pass, the narrator begins to hear a ringing in his ears that advances into the beating of a heart. It seemed very likely the narrator would escape the consequences of his deed, coping with the policemen admirably considering the circumstances; however, he soon plummets from his cheer to hysteria as he fears mockery from the police. It is the fear of judgement, hence the eye, that causes the murder; however prepared the narrator fancies himself, the fear and paranoia of the old man’s heart causes the narrator to confess. The same startling irony occurs in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the narrator battled against all odds. “The sentence---the dread sentence of death---was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears,” as the narrator recounts (62). The narrator is, later learned, accused of heresy during the Spanish Inquisition and is consequently given the punishment of death. Like a delicate dance with Death, the narrator escapes his macabre punishments often by a whisker through serendipity and luck. It comes as a surprise when, unlike the majority of Poe’s stories, the narrator is given a fortunate ending by being rescued. Notably, the narrator breaks out of one punishment through solely his desperate judgement by attracting rats with oil to chew through his bindings. Alternatively, if the narrator had allowed fear to continue to paralyze him, he likely would have been sliced open by a sharp
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