Literary Devices in The Pit and the Pendulum

This exclamation—”Free!”—followed by a dash and phrase pivots the narrator back into reality, and this phrase—”I had but escaped death...to be delivered unto worse death”—creates a sense of claustrophobia. At this point, the narrator has been freed, but he is still trapped within the pit, as illustrated by the structure of this sentence.

Throughout the next three paragraphs, the narrator becomes intoxicated with terror, as revealed through the use of the literary technique anaphora, the repetition of the first word or phrase in successive phrases. Here, the narrator vividly describes as the pendulum’s plunging downward by beginning each of these three paragraphs with the word “down.” In the first paragraph, the pendulum creeps; in the second, it descends “certainly, relentlessly”; finally, it descends “still unceasingly—still inevitably.” The closer the pendulum gets, the more frantic and urgent the diction becomes, the more vivid and terrifying the imagery transforms.

Kinesthesia, or kinesthetic imagery, is a literary device whereby the narrator describes physical bodily movement or action. Poe uses this technique frequently to detail how the narrator is physically incapacitated. Here, readers gather a sense of the frenzy of the narrator, whose perspiration bursts uncontrollably “from every pore.”

One of the ways Poe induces terror throughout his story is through the unknown. The narrator dreads opening his eyes and seeing what might be before him. Instead of fearing the tangible, he fears “nothing,” and when he opens his eyes, he confirms his worst fears when he sees that he is trapped in an empty abyss.

Up until this point in the story, the narrator has used auditory and tactile imagery to describe what he has witnessed in the pit—the strange sounds he overhears and the feeling of the sable drapes or the darkness that overcomes him. Sporadically, he has peppered the text with visual imagery to describe the the whiteness of the judge’s lips or the blackness of the pit. However, as the narrator readily admits, “so far, I had not opened my eyes.” The visual imagery, the narrator concedes, has been entirely fabricated in his mind, further eroding his credibility as a reliable, sane narrator.

As the narrator wades in and out of consciousness, his hearing becomes affected. At one moment he is enveloped in sound, and at the next, he is surrounded in silence. The narrator portrays this oscillation in sound through evocative language that builds on itself through anaphora, the repetitive use of a phrase or word at the beginning of a sentence. Throughout this passage, the narrator repeats the word “then” at the beginning of each line to switch imperceptibly from moments of loud commotion to moments of utter silence.

The narrator constantly uses repetitive language to highlight his diminishing grip on reality. For example, in the first paragraph, the narrator phrases the opening line as “I was sick—sick” and explains that the lips of the black-robed judges are “white—whiter than the sheets upon which I trace these words.” In this passage, the narrator employs the same repetitive language, stating that the tall figures “bore me in silence down—down—still down,” an image which eerily resembles the process of entombment. Here, the narrator employs the literary tool anadiplosis, whereby the narrator repeats the last word from the previous clause to begin the next. Such a tool functions to exacerbate the narrator’s condition because it often adds a sense of greater despair.

With erratic punctuation in the form of exclamation points and em dashes, the narrator breaks the narrative flow. As the narrator describes how he wades in and out of sleep, he is suddenly jolted awake with this exclamation. The contradictory language, highlighted with the repetition of “no!”, suggests that the narrator cannot maintain a steady stream of consciousness and is on the brink of insanity.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is told from a first-person point of view. In effect, the reader experiences the horror the protagonist endures from a firsthand perspective, allowing the reader to witness the torture on a much more intimate level. This opening line also sheds light on the narrator’s mental and physical state. Throughout the story, neither the narrator nor the reader ever find out what crime he committed, or if he is even aware of what crime he is being punished for. Poe creates a narrator who is teetering on the brink of insanity. As the story opens, we encounter a narrator who is sick “unto death,” meaning that he is both physically and mentally enfeebled. His mental and physical precariousness causes the reader to consider his reliability.