What are the five major literary devices in "The Pit and the Pendulum"?
Poe begins the story with an epigraph, though it is a faux epigraph, since he wrote it himself. An epigraph is a short quotation at the beginning of a literary work to suggest the work's theme. "The Pit and the Pendulum" begins with a Latin inscription Poe himself wrote as commentary on the fall of the French monarchy in the late 1790s, which Poe relates to the Spanish Inquisition in his story.
Poe chose the first person point of view of narration to tell the story. Using the first-person pronoun, "I," Poe pulls the reader into the story by creating intimacy with the person telling the story.
Poe makes use of sense imagery, creating sights, sounds, and sensations of the conditions in the dungeon where the narrator is being held.
Poe utilizes allusion when he writes "And now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there...
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came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo" to reference the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.
As he concludes the story, Poe utilizes the deus ex machina technique to free the narrator from his tortures; General LaSalle and his troops rescue him in the nick of time.
There are at least five major literary devices in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
Edgar Allan Poe is the "father" of the horror story. The first device is one that he uses so masterfully in his stories:
Suspense. What is known by the narrator as he describes his experience is dark and frightening, and what he does not know further heightens the intensity of the plot development. In the "prison" in which they place him, the dark allows him to feel somethings but other details remain, literally, in the dark as he cannot see.
Another device is imagery. In describing the "lips of the black-robed judges," he describes them as white, "whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words--and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness..."
Another literary device is the use of metaphors. "My vision fell upon the seven tall candles...seemed white slender angels who would save me...the angel forms became meaningless spectres..."
Foreshadowing occurs with the repeated references to motion and movement: "there came back to my soul motion and sound--the tumultuous motion of the heart...again sound, and motion...and a successful effort to move." This foreshadows the motion of the pendulum. "I saw it in motion..."
Hyperbole (exaggeration): "Could I have broken the fastenings above the elbow, I would have seized and attempted to arrest the pendulum. I might as well have attempted to arrest an avalanche!"
Repetition is used describing first the figures that carried him down into the dungeons: "down--down--still down...," and later describing the relentless movement of the pendulum toward the narrator "Down...Down...Down." And again, "THE PIT...THE PIT."
Poe uses literary devices artfully, not only in his stories, but also in his poetry.
What literary devices does Poe use to create suspense in "The Pit and the Pendulum"?
Edgar Allan Poe was the master at using a number of literary devices in his works. The Pit and the Pendulum is one of his most famous stories. In this story he sets up great suspense and a wonderful use of literary devices.
The story opens with a man on trial. It is during the Spanish Inquisition, and the narrator is telling us his story of what has happened to him. We don't know why he is on trial, and there are seven tall candles on a table. As he watches the candles melt her feels his hope for surviving diminish. As he goes to the torture chamber, we see Poe using his literary devices. Poe uses a couple different devices to make us see what is happening. He uses anadiplosis, which is when the last word or words of a sentence is used as the first word or words in the next sentence.
"That I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal. Unreal even when I breathed." The next example could be "For the moment at last I was free. Free and in the grasp of the inquisition" these are just a couple of examples he uses.
He also uses vivid descriptions of things. When he wants to really make something stand out to the reader, he uses such great descriptions. The description of the torture chamber is an example of this.
"I now observed with what horror it is needless to say, that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor appended to a weighty rod of brass."
He also uses symbolism throughout all of his works. The darkness of the torture chamber is a symbol of the darkness happening during the inquisition.
The suspense we feel is so very clever. We have suspense in the fact that we have no clue what the narrator is on trial for. What was his crime? When he is in the torture chamber, we have no idea what is going to happen to him or how far the torturer is willing to go. We see that the narrator is frightened by what he sees at the bottom of the pit, although we are not told what it is he has seen. We are left wondering the horrors of what could be at the bottom. Edgar Allan Poe was so creative in his works. He uses words and descriptions that put the reader inside the story.
What literary devices are used in the last two paragraphs of The Pit and the Pendulum and their effects?
The final two paragraphs of this story bring the events of the story to a crescendo, and this is reflected in the increasingly fragmented sentence structure and accompanying literary devices. The final paragraph itself is short, as are the sentences within it, suggesting a drumbeat-like rhythm of intensification, as if ultimate doom is drawing ever closer. Poe uses anaphora here, a common rhetorical device which can be heard in the speeches of politicians as a means of heightening anticipation and audience response: "There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was. . . . There was . . ." and so on. (Anaphora refers to the repetition of the same phrase or sentence structure.) Having heightened anticipation in this way, the author then uses synecdoche to create a final jolt or shock: "an outstretched arm" grasps the narrator. The arm, naturally, represents the whole person to whom it is attached, but the anticipation grows until this person is revealed in the next sentence as General Lasalle. The final sentence of the story is a flat declaration that suggests the outcome was inevitable and cannot be changed: "The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies."
The tone of the penultimate paragraph draws the reader toward the culmination of the story, but the key literary devices are found in the final paragraph itself. The longer sentences and significant amounts of descriptive detail in the prior paragraph help increase the effect of the devices used later. The devices rely upon the contrast between the preceding paragraph and the subsequent short, sharp sentences detailing revelations.
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