The Pit and the Pendulum

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is famous for its excruciatingly vivid description of pure dread. Almost nothing actually happens to the narrator in this dungeon—it almost happens, and that’s precisely where the horror lies.

The worst thing in the world, Poe suggests, isn’t to die, but to fear death and the suffering that might attend death. Or perhaps more subtly, it’s to fear that fear, to experience fear feeding on itself. The narrator of this story makes it clear that fear is utterly absorbing, destabilizing, and even dehumanizing. It can undo a person to the extent that they long for death. If that’s true, one hardly needs an Inquisitorial dungeon to go through some of the world’s worst tortures: One’s own mind can do the job perfectly well on its own.

It’s possible to read this entire story as a kind of dream-vision. The long passage about dreams and unconsciousness early on in the story makes poetic and even optimistic claims for the unconscious, arguing that a close connection with the unconscious mind is the precursor of art, and the purview of only a chosen few.

But in the rest of the story, the ability to see those mid-air visions comes at a tremendous cost. On a literal level, the narrator’s imaginative skill turns against him as he goes through his ordeal: He’s all too capable of imagining the first slice of the pendulum when it hits his skin or the possible contents of the dreadful pit, even before he gets a good look at what’s down there.

The story also maps the perils of the imagination symbolically in its very structure. The narrator’s imagination is itself a pit, a depth he’s plumbing. And within that larger pit is an even deeper pit that houses the most dreadful thing there is. Poe leaves that worst thing undescribed and up to our imaginations, inviting us to run through a series of horrendous options, proving his point: To go down into the imaginative dream world is to eventually be forced into an unbearable confrontation with whatever one fears most.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” ends with a sudden deus ex machina that feels a lot like startling awake from a nightmare. But even though General Lasalle himself—a force of order, convention, rationality, and the daytime world—grabs the narrator by the shoulder, the pit itself is still there, waiting.