The Pit and the Pendulum

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I am by no stretch of the imagination a seasoned reader; my profound lack of reading books during my most ‘informative years’ puts me at a bit of a disadvantage in terms of the amount of works that I have read. So please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think there has ever been any author anywhere who has been able to create a glimpse into the complexities of the human psyche better than Edgar Allen Poe.

Although he arguably gives an incredible flourish to his narratives in terms of the dramatic and gothic imagery he conjures, he’s the closest author (that I have come across) who is able to actually put the distressed mind state of the mentally ill individual into words that are extravagant, but not clichéd. This morning’s traverse down the gothic rabbit hole was The Pit and the Pendulum.

This short story tells the chilling tale of a political prisoner sentenced to death and then tossed into a dungeon cell where all manner of nightmarish tortures await to turn him mad including infernal darkness, demonic images painted on the ceiling, an infestation of ravenous rats, a dark and ominous pit, and a slowly descending, razor-edged pendulum that drops ever towards his bound body.

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The metaphoric interpretation behind this tale is that it’s an extravagant depiction of the depressed mind –Poe himself suffered from depression and mental illness, which was aggravated by alcohol. More than that, the story is one of the most thrilling stories in which literally nothing happens, but there is always the terrifying promise that some grim and climactic horror is soon to take place. Poe’s ability to pique his readers’ fascination and suspense goes beyond the boundaries of exciting the nerves and straight into shattering them, giving the reader a similar experience to that of his poor, trapped, and tormented protagonist.

This symmetrical reading experience is what makes The Pit and the Pendulum one of his most celebrated works, being masterfully crafted and painfully intimate with its signature first person register, potentially unreliable narrator, and brilliant, but simple prose that perfectly creates the book’s nightmarish images in the mind’s eye as well as superbly establishes its defeated and doomed tone.

The Pit and the Pendulum was written by Edgar Allen Poe and first published in 1843 when it was serialized in The Gift for 1843, Philadelphia.