Analysis Of Death Of The Pendulum

Death and terror, the inevitable of demise of everything and everyone, there is no escape. It bugs us everyday to know your going to die, but you just don’t know when, just like the pendulum hangs over the main character in the story. The story begins with the trial of the narrator, as he sits before seven very severe judges; he is "sick — sick unto death," because the judges have an "immoveable resolution — of stern contempt of human torture." The narrator is so completely obsessed by the horror of the proceedings that he cannot even hear his sentence as it is being pronounced; instead, he recalls all of the horrible tales of "monkish tortures" which awaited the victims of the Inquisition. After swooning, the narrator awakens in total darkness;

After drinking deeply, he realizes that the water must have been drugged since he immediately loses consciousness again, and later, when he is again awake, there is a sulfurous light which reveals that the walls are one-half their original size. Logically, he tries to determine how he originally made such an error. He knows that he is in the same place because of the horrible, dismal circular pit. But to his horror, he is now completely bound head and foot, except for his left hand up to his left elbow. He is bound to a "species of low framework of wood." Looking upward, he sees a huge razor-sharp pendulum swinging in an arch, criss-crossing his body. Turning to survey the rest of the vault, he sees enormous rats running across the slimy floor. After watching the rats for about thirty minutes, he again looks at the pendulum and is horrified to realize that the sweep has increased considerably and even more disturbing, it has descended. Now he "can no longer doubt the doom prepared for [him] by monkish ingenuity in torture." The sweep of "the pendulum was at right angles [and] was designed to cross the region of the heart." The vault and the bottomless pit are just as horrible as the very pit of hell itself might be. It seems as though it is days before the pendulum comes so close to him that the "odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils," but eventually it does, and when the

But unlike many of Poe's stories, we do know the time and place of this story: It takes place in Toledo, Spain, during the Spanish Inquisition. Of course, this setting and time is so far removed from the present day that the story does conform to the Romantic tradition of placing stories in some distant place and time so that there are no real identifications made. Again, Poe's story has (1) an unnamed narrator, (2) is set in the distant past, (3) concentrates upon a single effect — the effect of terror or horror by means of mental suspense, and (4) is related to many other stories by Poe's concept that in sleeping, in fainting, and, ultimately, even after death, there is a "something" that still lives and is still active, some part of the human essence ("even in the grave all is not lost" is a main idea of Poe's "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Premature Burial," and other