Reflection-Pit and the Pendulum

When reading this story, I can tell how this can be resembled as a part of the Dark Romanticism period. It has some tragedy in it which is one of the characteristics in the Dark Romanticism, and it also has some mystery within it as well. The mystery first comes at the beginning of the story where he is talking about his death. "I was sick--sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence--the dread sentence of death--was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears" (Poe 263). The mystery in this is you ask yourself he is dying or will he live? That is what I got out of this first paragraph of the story. This story is talking about death and the act of dying. Which when I am reading a story I really do not want to talk about death and dying, but yet that is what the Dark Romanticism period. This story could also appeal to the Romanticism side because it is very detailed in what the story is saying. Here is another quote from the first page, "They appeared to me white--whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words--and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness--of immovable resolution--of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still issuing from those lips" (Poe 263). I typed this quote because it can resemble a little bit of the romanticism aspect that we are talking about last semester with the description. Another quality of the Dark Romanticism period is the idea of death and just mourning over the fact that he is going to die. It is kind of that emotional aspect that we are talking about last class with the poems.

The psychological factor in this story is the questioning he is having with himself. He is always questioning what is real and what is not. He always seems to have visions throughout the story which sometimes he is unable to distinguish what is happening. "In this story we find the most explicit statement in Poe's fiction of his sense of the blurry line between dream and reality. The narrator considers that although when we awake even from the soundest sleep..." (May). This is an example from a criticism I found on this story. There does seem to be a "blurry line between dream and reality" (May) in this story which makes it part of the Dark Romanticism period. One last quote, " It might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward" (Poe 269). This also talks about the dream and reality (May) that the criticism is talking about. "The Pit and the Pendulum" shows a great deal of the Dark Romanticism period throughout the story.

Bibliography

May, Charles E. "Alternate Realms of Reality." In Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 96–97. Quoted as "Dreams and Reality in the Story" in Harold Bloom, ed. Edgar Allan Poe, Bloom's Major Short Story Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 1998. (Updated 2007.) Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe

Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 263-273. Print.