Poe's Stories brief biography of edgar allan poe
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Short Story By Flannery OConnor
| The sounds become more frequent and louder, but they cannot possibly be issuing from the remains under the floorboards – they seem instead to be a figment of the narrator’s imagination and we become witness to the true chaos of this man’s mental state. The narrator of "Tell-Tale Heart" talks faster and louder to try to cover it up and now, panicked, paces the floor. But the policemen, still talking casually, don’t seem to notice. The sound rises above everything, and still the policemen act as if nothing is wrong. The narrator convinces himself that they are fully aware of the crime and are mocking him. He paces the floor, until he loses control entirely and confesses everything, telling the men to tear up the floorboards and that they will find the beating heart. This is the perfect example of a character whose mind is acting against itself. The narrator’s paranoia leads him to extremely realistic delusions about the suspicions of those around him even though, to the reader, it seems as though they really have no suspicion at all. His psychological instability condemns him before anything else does. THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM The story begins at the moment the narrator of "Pit and Pendulum" is sentenced to death at the time of the Catholic Inquisition. The narrator listens to his sentence in a dreamlike state, watching the sinister movement of the judges lips and the swaying black drapes. Then his senses cutout, and he is filled with a shock-like sensation and the figures around him turn into angel-like ghosts. He faints. Poe uses the real-life nightmare of the Catholic Inquisition to place his narrator in plausible mortal terror. He adds his own brand of supernatural sensations and visions to the historical detail, making the Inquisition doubly Gothic and mystical. The narrator of "Pit and Pendulum" tries to describe the strange swoon. It is not like sleep or death, it has its own particular sensations which occur in two stages, the first the return of the spirit, then of the body. He believes that if one is able to remember the first stage during the reawakening of the body, then the gulf that the person who fainted has fallen into will be recalled like the details of a dream. He imagines that the inability to recall this dream is what drives many men into madness. The first person narration places us, as readers, in such close alignment with the narrator that we are able to follow the physical and mental sensations of fainting and awakening as they occur. The really terrifying thing about the swoon is how deep and dangerous it feels to the narrator, as if he might disappear into it and not return. As the "Pit and Pendulum" narrator’s body awakens, he tries to remember his own descent into this dreamworld, and imagines silent figures carrying him into darkness and then a terrible stillness as they pause. Then, sound and motion returns and the narrator comes back to consciousness and remembers the details of the trial. He lays still, terrified to open his eyes, not knowing what state he is in. His worst fear is realized – he can see nothing when he opens his eyes, everything is pitch black. The figures that appear in the narrator’s fainting dream and the judge-like figures of the courtroom together make a ghostly impression of the narrator’s enemy—a many-bodied and many- mouthed but sort of faceless entity that can condemn him to death with overwhelming power. Get hundreds more LitCharts at www.litcharts.com ©2017 LitCharts LLC www.LitCharts.com Page 43 The narrator of "Pit and Pendulum" tries to figure out what has happened. He can’t possibly be dead. He knows he is condemned to death but doesn’t think they’ve put him in a cell to await his fate because he knows that the hangings of the auto-da-fees happen swiftly, whenever there is anew victim. He notices the stone floors of the prison and panics suddenly that he has been put in a tomb. He flings his arms and walks around and is relieved to find space and air not befitting a tomb. He remembers the nightmares he has heard about the Toledo dungeons. He knows he will die, but the question of when and how torments him. Download 0.58 Mb. Share with your friends:
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