Literature

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is an American short story writer, a critic, poet and an editor who was born on January 19th of the year 1909 in Boston, Maryland. Poe is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre in his stories (Diggory, 2014). Poe’s tale ‘The murders in the rue morgue’ which was written in 1841, initiated the modern detective story and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivalled in the American fiction. The Raven a poem that was written in 1845 is among the best-known poems in the national literature.

Edgar Allan Poe was the son of the English actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr. an actor from Baltimore. He attained his classical education from Scotland and England from 1815-20 and for only 11 months he attended the University of Virginia in 1826 where he terminated his education as a result of his guardian’s anger for he was an addicted gambler always losing at the university. Poe returned to Richmond where he found his soul mate Sarah engaged. He went to Boston, and in 1927 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems and Tamerlane. Due to poverty, Poe was forced to join the military under the names Edgar A. Perry, but on his mother’s death, John Allan purchased his release from the army assisting Poe to get an appointment to the US military academy at the west point where he got expelled due to his absenteeism. Poe was an alcohol addict that eventually caused his death on October 7th, 1849.

Edgar’s work related much to the romanticism with the occult and the satanic (Burwick, 2015). His work also owes much to his feverish dreams to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. Poe’s productions are much dependent on his powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. Poe’s sound and keen judgment as an appraiser of the contemporary literature along with his dramatic art of storytelling secured him a prominent position among the globally known scholars. The most outstanding fact in Poe’s character is the aspect of strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seemed to point to the coexistence of two persons in one. To the people he loved, he was gentle and devoted, to others who were the butt of his criticism found himself center and irritable and even accused him of lack of principle.

Poe’s major works are concerned with terror and sadness, but in the ordinary circumstances, he was a pleasant companion (Symons, 2014). Poe talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature and read his works of poetry and those of others in a voice that was surpassing with beauty. Poe was a great admirer of Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He possessed a sense of humor, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. In the case to which Poe’s mind was considered, the aspect of duality would be more striking with one of his side being an idealist and a visionary. Poe’s yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty along with the sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics “to Helen, Annabel Lee, Eulalie, to open one in paradise” and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in “Liguria and Eleonora”. In work ‘Israfel’, Poe’s imagination carried him away from the real world to the dream world to which the python mood was a characteristic to his later life. Due to his critic nature, Poe laid much stress upon the correctness of language, meter and structure. He formulated rules for the short stories to which he sought the ancient unities that is the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place, adding the unities of mood or effect.

The Pit and the Pendulum- Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe was among the dark romantic writers who wanted to leave back what was rational and tangible in the world to discover the unsettling truth that lies in the dark and the irrational depths of the human mind. In his short story, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ there is the emphasis of punishment, horror, darkness as well as psychological effects of uncontrollable irrationality and fear, the inscrutable and the evil as a destructive force. The narrator of the story has been condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, and he finds himself in variable states of consciousness declaring that he is sick- ‘sick unto death with long agony.’ The narrator seems to be hallucinating as he describes the inquisitional voices as a ‘dreamy indeterminate hum’. He first imagines angel forms to which later becomes meaningless specters with heads of flames as he has a transcendent experience. He further slips in and out of the consciousness, and as he somewhat recovers, he senses that he is enclosed in walls. He then decides to cross the area, he is tripped and falls to the ground where he finds a big pit just in front of him. He realizes that if he had fallen, he could only have broken his born but not die.

After the narrator awakens from his exhaustion, he finds himself strapped to a wooden frame, and he can only be able to move his head and his left arm with which he can feed himself. Despite the food being heavily spiced, the prisoner is not provided with water, and this makes him thirstier. As he looks up, he sees a pendulum fitted with a sharp blade swinging down over him. At the same time, the narrator notices rats scurrying about the floor, attracted by the scent of the meat he has been provided. He notices that the pendulum is moving closer to him and the movement has increased. The moving blade causes the narrator to sense the grotesquerie of the dungeon. The prisoner spends hours in horror of the death that awaits him, and at the same time he is hungry and reaches for the remnants of his meal left behind by the rats. After a proper internalization, the narrator realizes that the pendulum would strike across his heart and he waits horrified. But then an idea comes to him that he could convince the rats to chew the bindings that hold him by putting the remnants of the meat they have eaten on the ties. Soon, the rats run to him eating the strappings and finally they are broken.

After being released from the bindings and he becomes free, the walls of the dungeon seems to be on fire, and they are so much closer to him. The narrator is left with no option but to jump close to the pit. With agony, he let out a scream and cry of desperation when he suddenly hears the sounds of the trumpets. The fiery walls rush back, and he is pulled by the arm back to the abyss. The French army had entered Toledo, and the inquisition was done by the enemies.

The short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is gothic literature that is aimed at imposing fear and terror to the reader and the victim by instituting horror and macabre in the story (Mulvey-Roberts, 2016). The story is set up in a dungeon that is an element of gothic. Furthermore, the place is full of darkness, and the narrator cannot be able to walk well leading to his tripling and felling. To add more terror, the narrator trips to the edge of a pit making him shake in fear. Similarly, the incidence creates a gloomy mood in the reader and always keep to inquire and anxious about what happens next.

The next moment we are introduced to the narrator bound with ropes and a sharp blade hanging on a pendulum swinging up and down. Here the narrator is helpless. The great pendulum acts as the villain instituting fear and pain to the narrator (Burduck, 2017). To extend the matter further and worse, macabre is introduced with the presence of rats in the area. Rats are an indication of death and rotting things to add to this the narrator claims that the walls contained some demonic figures. All this time, the narrator was helpless, in fear and great pain due to torture. After he was able to free himself from the ropes, the entire building which seemed to be made of steel started to heat up leaving the narrator with no choice rather than jump into the pit where he says he could sense the number of dead individuals who were once prisoners like him. The whole story is about horror as an illustration of the gothic literature to which Edgar Allan Poe incorporated in most of his works of literature including the raven (Poe, 2015). Despite the writer of the story being an addict to alcohol and betting, his works are ranked among the best in the world as Poe was the greatest contributor to the British literature in the gothic category.

Work cited

Burduck, Michael L. Grim Phantasms: Fear in Poe’s Short Fiction. Vol. 3. Routledge, 2017.

Burwick. Romanticism: Keywords. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.

Diggory, Terence. Yeats and American poetry: the tradition of the self. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. The handbook of the gothic. Springer, 2016.

Poe, Edgar Allan, and William Giraldi. The Annotated Poe. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Symons, Julian. The Life And Works Of Edgar Allen Poe. House of Stratus, 2014.