The Pit and the Pendulum

Edgar Allan PoeFiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1842

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Literary Devices

Parallelism

Parallelism is a literary device in which the author repeats the same kind of grammatical structure multiple times in a row for effect. Poe makes vivid use of parallelism when he describes the pendulum’s steady, terrible descent. Three short paragraphs in a row begin with sentences constructed exactly the same way, and even beginning with exactly the same word: “Down.” He begins: “Down—steadily down it crept” (253). The next paragraph has: “Down—certainly, relentlessly down!” (254). In the third, we read: “Down—still unceasingly—still inevitably down!” (254)

These parallel sentences all share a basic pattern: the word “down,” an emphatic dash, and a smattering of tortured adverbs. But they also evolve, moving from periods to exclamation points, and from a single adverb to a whole series. That combination of repetition and intensification mirrors exactly what the sentences are describing: the relentless swing of the pendulum, which indeed becomes more and more fearful as it comes “down.” Notice, too, how Poe both begins and ends each of these sentences with the word “down,” evoking the back-and-forth motion of the pendulum even more precisely.

Imagery

The narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum” evokes his ordeal with every one of his senses, using vivid imagery, or description. As the terrible pendulum begins to swing, he hears its “hiss” as it cuts the air; as it gets closer, he notes the “odor of the sharp steel”; as he baits the dungeon’s rats into gnawing his bindings free, he feels “their cold lips” against his own mouth (253, 255).

These images make the narrator’s suffering feel as suffocating, loathsome, and inescapable to the reader as it is to him. Tracking his experience with minutely detailed imagery, the narrator evokes the general nastiness of his situation. He also gives us a sense of how time seems to slow down in moments of horror. It’s not just that the narrator is experiencing everything that happens through his appalled, heightened senses, it’s that he has the time to experience things this way.

Deus Ex Machina

The end of “The Pit and the Pendulum” is one of the most famous moments of deus ex machina in literature. Deus ex machina, Latin for “God from/outside the machine,” describes an unprecedented intervention that salvages a hopeless situation at the last minute—as if a deity has swooped in to fix everything all of a sudden. Here, the speaker is literally on the verge of the pit when “an outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies” (256).

Often, a deus ex machina feels a little too convenient, a little deflating—which is the case in this story. The narrator has ratcheted up the tension unbearably, and then all at once, at the last possible second, it’s all over. The flaming walls even “rush” back. And who can believe that the commander of the French forces himself just so happens to come save this one guy in this deeply-buried dungeon?

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The sheer heavy-handedness of this deus ex machina asks us to see this story in rather less literal terms. The arrival of the general might be read, for instance, as an awakening after sleep: the stern, orderly, regimented “General” of consciousness chases away all the nightmarish, half-formed horrors of the speaker’s “imprisonment” in dread and dream.