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The pit and the pendulum literary essay
The pit and the pendulum literary essay
The pit and the pendulum literary essay
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The Pit and the Pendulum could lead to many thoughts. However, I will cover three particular ones that caught my interest. I will elaborate of my thoughts of the main character’s view of the dark, judging characters as well as his descending into the “Hades” like place, the symbolism of the pendulum and the pit, and the character’s final, fatal fall into the pit. In the introduction to the story, the main character describes how he was sick and how he was unbound and then judged by the grim reaper-like characters. He is talking about this capture, during the Spanish Inquisitorial. “They” as he refers his captors to, had finally brought him to a destination and unbound him, which leads us to infer that he was indeed captured. When he speaks of the “dread sentence of death” this is his execution sentence. After this, he says, the voices of the Inquisitors blur into one hum. I take this as the character’s “numb” stage, where the realization that he is going to be killed has not taken his full effect. Next, the black-robed figures. I think that the ...
Suspense is the feeling of uncertainty or excitement, in waiting for an outcome or decision. Edgar Allan Poe uses suspense in his story “Masque of the Red Death” by using objects and great descriptive detail. Poe’s story is about a prince that tries to escape from the inevitable. He tries to lock himself away from the ‘red death’ and has a masquerade ball that doesn’t end happily. Prince and all of his guests die inside or around the seventh apartment room. The seventh room is preceded by six colored rooms which are meant to symbolize either the stages of life, or the seven sins. Inside the last room there are black velvet tapestries that hang all over the ceiling and down the walls. The window panes are a deep blood red color which gives the room an unwelcoming atmosphere. On the western wall, there is a gigantic clock of a deep black wood. Inside it has a pendulum that swings back and forth with a dull monotonous clang. When the minute hand marks a new hour, there is a clear, loud, deep sound, which can be heard from far away. Although it can give off an eerie feeling, the great eb...
The texts I chose for this essay are Fuentes’ Aura and Thomas Ligotti’s The Last Feast of Harlequin. Both are dark tales that are full of symbolism. Interpreting some of this symbolism may tell us why the main character acts the way he does and what his mental state is throughout the story.
The allegory tells of a person who is put into a cave at infancy and knows nothing except for the shadows that the bypassers project onto the wall. The person is blind to the knowledge of what is out “there” much like Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby. Jay is stuck in a romantic fantasy, which he devotes his life to. He often refers to a light he stares at across the bay. This light symbolizes the step that Jay needs to overcome in order to escape from his darkness and enter into the “light” of knowledge and understanding of his fantasy. If one, such as Jay, dwells in the presence of knowledge but refuses to gain it, then no good may be done.
Regardless that the film appears to be designed for a specific age-related target audience, there are several characters throughout the entire film that viewers can relate to. Therefore that in return keeps the viewer exceedingly intrigued, interested, and ultimately, entertained. Consequently, as a viewer the most prolific symbolism in the entire film being the metaphoric infinite abyss. As a viewer, the infinite abyss represents life in general, the meaning of life. Life can be a deep dark bottomless pit. One can either succumb to it, as it swallows you up and takes you down, or one can prefer to stand at the top and scream down at it in defiance, and create your own paths in life, and fill that abyss with meaning, purpose, friendships, family, happiness and love. Therefore, as soon as you alter the manner you view the world, you transform everything that happens to you within it. Life is just a state of
Both authors make a point of showing the narrow-mindedness of humans by nature. In “Allegory of the Cave”, the prisoners believed that the shadows they were seeing were reality, with nothing more to it. The comfort of the said perceived, and therefore the fear of the unrecognized outside world would end in the prisoner being forced to climb the steep ascent of the cave and step outside int...
The horses rattling chains are a symbol of the slavery and lack of freedom. This symbol occurs quite often. The mouse in the novella is soft, small, this is a symbol of innocence. This for shadows Lennie he is venerable. Lennie is a symbol himself in his action towards beguiling soft things. Like when he stroked that ladies dress and she cried out rape it was a symbol of the power a white woman had then. Another example of this is when crooks said to Curley’s wife to go or he would call the boss to Curley’s wife but all she did was black mailed him by saying, “Listen, Nigger, you know what I can do if you open your trap, I could get you strung up on a tree so easy it ain’t funny.
Stories have an opportunity to leave the reader with many different impressions. When you look a different characters within the stories the ones that leave the greatest impressions are the ones that tend to scare us. The figures in Bob Dylar’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have you been?”, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”, and Stephen King’s “The Man in the Black Suite” all instill a bit of fear in the reader. They are symbols that represent the devil or devil like attributes in people and the uncertainties of human nature.
...wly dropping from the gallows, as the townspeople raised their arms in celebration. Audible drumbeats were played as the bodies went limp, emphasizing the finality of death.
Gotten notification from the "demise watches" in the divider and found in the holding up and hopeful "eye of a vulture," it unobtrusively undermines the storyteller 's confidence. For sure, he has turned out to be so fixated by the sound of time that he hears it all around and in all things. There is a lot of mental intending to be found in his hot statement: "Most importantly was the feeling of listening to intense. I heard all things in the paradise and in the earth. I heard numerous things in damnation." Listening to the old man 's moan, he even hears in it "the low smothered sound that emerges from the base of the spirit." For the storyteller, every one of the sounds are between related and one; also, they have their source in a spooky and baffled creative
The author’s purpose is to also allow the audience to understand the way the guards and superintendent felt towards the prisoners. We see this when the superintendent is upset because the execution is running late, and says, “For God’s sake hurry up, Francis.” And “The man ought to have been dead by this time.” This allows the reader to see the disrespect the authority has towards the prisoners.
Suspense is a key factor to the story, “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allen Poe. According to the Oxford Dictionary, suspense is the state or feeling of excited or anxious uncertainty about what may happen. Poe uses the senses to bring the reader aware of the building suspense. He does this by telling the reader about the ominous setting of all the chambers, especially the seventh chamber. The sound of the grandfather clock, sending sinister shivers throughout the party goers each hour, keeps them on their toes. Finally, the fast-paced chase of the intruder and the Prince build to the suspense at the final moments of the story.
This is the moment narrator realizes that he was not about to kill a sick and unhealthy man, he sees that the man has some will to live left in him, something that he has not ever seen in a prisoner until now. Before the hanging of the man, the narrator notices the prisoner saying something:
...h the “crackling and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten until hour” (32). He would never remember anything as it was, for it was now a distant and vague memory. But his torture was happening every day and every moment of his life.
What is fear? Is it being in a prison so dark a person can not see in front of them? In this complete darkness the narrator finds himself eating and drinking, then passing out on a cold floor. When he wakes he is somewhere else in the dark cell. Or is it a cell? Could it be a tomb? Just when he thinks the cell is so big he finds himself almost falling into a pit. He eats and sleeps again. Where or how will he wake? Does he wake from his drugged food? In this story “The Pit and the Pendulum,” by Edgar Allan Poe, he tells the terrifying struggle of a man dealing with fear, torture, and confinement.
Supporting Passage #4: He finds humor in the terror of the old man. Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief --oh, no! --it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart (paragraph 6). And the pounding sound of the Old’s man heart drove him over the edge of all reasons. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me --the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man 's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead (Paragraph 10). The narrator has gladly taken the life of another and has reached that point, that point that sets a man apart from all other men