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Edgar Allen Poe: A Comparison of Two Short Stories
Edgar Allen Poe was a troubled author who suffered many tragedies during his lifetime, and reflected those tragic events throughout his many writings. Two of Poe’s short stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” are great examples of Poe’s ever present fear of death which was developed during his youth with the loss of his mother and wife. While both stories are similar, with each main character having to face the fear of impending death, the stories differ in the method with which Poe conveys his main themes.
The Pit and the Pendulum is a story about a man who is sentenced to death during the Spanish inquisition. This story is a clever twist on the age old fact that for human beings, the fear of death was often a greater torture than the death itself. Edgar Allen Poe skillfully kept the reader in a constant state of suspense and shock as each method of torture was followed with a greater, more horrific one while simultaneously hinting at the hope of survival. The slow, unrelieved mental torture of the narrator would become the central theme for this short story. While not much is revealed about the circumstances of how the narrator came to be imprisoned, or whether he is guilty or innocent, the narrator is certain that he is in the famed Toledo prison of Paris and caught up in the grip of the inquisition. Throughout the story, the narrator was in a constant state of fear and was aware that he faced certain death. However, the method of his demise remained unknown.
Poe cleverly used dramatic wording to describe the amount of horror, fear, and torture the narrator experienced upon discovery of each method of execution. The narrator described how he felt “sick unto death” upon hearing his sentence handed down and began to recall all that he was told about the inquisition and the...