20 pages • 40-minute read
The Pit and the Pendulum
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Dreams and the Unconscious
At the beginning of the story, the narrator pauses the narrative of his trial for a long reflection on human consciousness. He insists that people are somehow conscious even after they’ve fainted, considers the relationship of fainting to dreams and death, and lays out his belief that those who are prone to fainting are also in the closest contact with their imaginations. In fainting, the narrator “finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow,” and his sensitive, inventive subconscious mind makes his later suffering so acute (247).
This moment when the narrator steps away from his immediate experience to philosophize prompts us to read “The Pit and the Pendulum” through the lens of the imagination, sleep, and dreams, and perhaps even to read the story itself as a kind of dream-narrative.
The narrator’s ordeal has an inherently dreamlike, symbolic quality. He’s in darkness deep underground—an image that recalls descending into sleep, or into the grave (where, he insists, consciousness persists).
Then he confronts symbolic threats. First, he has to deal with the darkness and the feeling that he might stumble into a trap—in other words, with the terror of the uncontrollable and unknown, descriptions that bring to mind the subconscious. Then, he has to confront the swinging pendulum moving ever closer—a straightforwardly symbolic dream-image of the approach of death and the passing of time, fundamental human fears. Finally, he must face the pit-within-a-pit, a hole in his dungeon floor that’s full of ultimate horror: the thing each person’s subconscious holds that they absolutely don’t want to face.
It makes sense that General Lasalle conveniently arrives to rescue the narrator just as he is on the verge of falling into the pit: It’s as if the narrator startles awake just at the point of encountering the one thing he finds truly unendurable.
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is a story about the agony of psychological torture—and all its images suggest that anyone with a subconscious and an imagination is perfectly capable of putting themselves through just such agony without any Inquisitorial assistance.
Fear and Dread
“The Pit and the Pendulum” suggests that there’s no physical agony that mental agony can’t make worse. The fiendish Inquisitors understand this very well: They don’t simply hurt the narrator, but instead impose “the most hideous moral horror” on him by letting him imagine how they’ll hurt him later (250).
In order to create dread, they use two opposite methods—and often, the narrator collaborates with them. The first method is withholding information. They deny him sight, leaving him in pitch darkness. The narrator helps his captors: He is reluctant to open his eyes when he first wakes up because he’s afraid to see nothing. In this scenario, the “moral horror” comes from pure imagination. The narrator knows the Inquisition likes to mete out the worst possible deaths, and in the darkness he’s free to imagine exactly how that might play out.
The second method of dread-creation is to provide information. Once the narrator has figured out that there’s a terrible pit in the center of his dark dungeon, the Inquisitors strap him down, turn the lights on, and let him watch a swinging blade descending toward him. Now he knows exactly what he has to fear, and is forced to watch it coming.
The imagination works on both kinds of approaching horrors. Having thoroughly examined both of these related flavors of “moral horror,” Poe even turns the trick against his readers, showing them the narrator weeping in despair and agony over what he finally sees in the pit—and letting readers draw their own inventive conclusions about this absolute worst of all fates could be.
The overarching point here is that, through the power of dread, the mind becomes its own torture chamber. The narrator’s circumstances may be extreme—but they’re only an image of what goes on inside a fearful mind on a regular basis. Whether one’s struggling with the unknown or the all-too-well-known, fear feels the same. And it’s capable of reducing people to madness.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence