The Pit and the Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum was a long story that we read during class. Edgar Allan Poe was the author of this story. I think that it was kind of a hard story to follow along with, because it was so boring. I did not really think what was going on in the story was that interesting, but that does not matter. The Pit and the Pendulum, I noticed, did have a lot of examples of Dark Romanticism. I think this whole story was very dark. Everything that was happening in the story such as the setting, what he was going through, and his tone all set kind of a dark story.

Dark romanticism was used a lot in the 18th century and also in the 60's and 80's in music. Edgar Allen Poe was one that was known to write about dark romanticism. I saw a lot of examples of Edgar Allan Poe talking about and using the examples of dark romanticism. There was a lot of talking about death in The Pit and the Pendulum. In my eyes, death is the main basis of dark romanticism. The story was talking the whole time about all of the sufferings he went through and how the main character was in jail.

The Pit and the Pendulum talks about a narrator who is coming to a time of death and he is getting this punishment from the judges of the Spanish Inquisition. He did not just die, he got tortured a lot before, "including being bound beneath a scythe pendulum that descends ever closer to his chest as it swings back and forth, and being forced toward a fathomless pit" (Poe). Dark Romanticism was about these kinds of things, because the main part of this story was a guy that got tortured before his death. I think that he went through things that no- one would ever want to go through, which reminds me of dark romanticism also because it is a subject that not a lot of people like.

I looked up a criticism on The Pit and the Pendulum, and I actually got some good information from it. Edgar Allen Poe was the only one that really had good criticims on this story, which was kind of weird considering he was the author of this story. Edgar has done this a lot though. "The Pit and the Pendulum" illustrates Poe's authorial belief in the "unity of design," the principle that all elements of a piece must work toward a single effect embodied in the narrator and shared by the reader." (Poe). I think that this was the main point of Poe's story, and I think that there are points from this that you can compare with dark romanticism. I think this is related to Dark Romanticism by the meaning of the single effect. The single effect that he is talking about is the terror of being faced with death with hard conditions and all of the things that he had to go through that was very brutal before his death. I think that this person was going through a dark time that turned into a time of death, which reminds us a lot of dark romanticism.

E. N. S. "'The Pit and the Pendulum'." In Barney, Brett, and Lisa Paddock, eds. Encyclopedia of American Literature: The Age of Romanticism and Realism, 1816–1895, vol. 2, Revised Edition. New York: Facts On File, Inc., 2008. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. http://www.fofweb.com/activelink2.asp?ItemID=WE54&SID=5&iPin= EAmL0722&SingleRecord=True (accessed November 29, 2010).