hanging into the pit. He becomes filled with terror and "agitated." He falls asleep, and wakens with great thirst. He drinks a drugged liquid and falls asleep again.

When he wakes up, he is strapped to a table with the pendulum far above him. He considers his situation, he prays, he struggles, he becomes "frantically mad," but finally a resignation takes over as he realizes he is going to die. As the pendulum gets closer and closer and he realizes the type of death he will die, he alternately laughs and howls, showing an unstable mental state. Only when the pendulum descends to about ten to twelve strokes away from him does he experience the "collected calmness of despair" that allows him to clearly devise an escape plan. While the rats are swarming over him, he experiences "disgust, for which the world has no name" but has the mental capacity to force himself to remain absolutely still.

When he escapes, he finds himself facing the eerie paintings of the demons and has a hard time persuading himself they are not real. As the wall close in, he has no time to think, and he screams in despair. As he is rescued by General Lasalle, he gives no insight into the state of his mind. However, one might assume that the traumas he endured would cause his moods and mental states to swing like a pendulum the rest of his life as he relives the horrors of his torture and the joy of his rescue. 

In Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Pit and the Pendulum," many details are left unexplained. The narrator, who is never named, is being held by the Spanish Inquisition. The trial and sentencing described in the first paragraph includes "inquisitorial voices" and "black-robed judges," and the narrator mentions the Inquisition in twelfth paragraph.

The Spanish Inquisition operated from 1478 to 1834 in Spain. Its primary purpose was to test the validity of the faith of Jews and Muslims who had ostensibly converted to Catholicism. At the peak of the Inquisition, a grand inquisitor was assisted by a council of five members, so those may be the judges referred to in the story. The reason a person was condemned by the Inquisition was religious heresy--practicing a religion at odds with Catholicism. It is possible any enemy of the Church could also come under the purview of the inquisitor. The fact that the narrator was not immediately burned at the stake in conjunction with the auto-da-fe, a pageant in which heretics were turned over to the secular authorities to be executed, might suggest that he was not a run-of-the-mill heretic but had done something more onerous to the Inquisition, causing him to be held over for a more brutal and psychologically agonizing type of death. 

Poe must have believed the reason for the character's imprisonment was a moot point. No crime, after all, could deserve the type of unwarranted torture that the narrator is subjected to. Not naming the character or his crime means that any reader can more easily put himself or herself in the place of the man who endures these horrors.

We do not learn why the narrator has been taken captive. When the story begins, he is in the midst of his trial, and while he sees his judges speaking, he is unable to hear them. He is overcome with horror. Later, he is so happy to have fallen on his face because, had he taken even one more step, he would have plummeted to his death in the pit in his pitch-black cell. He says,

my chin rested upon the floor of the prion, but my lips, and the upper portion of my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than the chin, touched nothing. At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy vapor, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose to my nostrils.

He realizes that he'd fallen just off the edge of a very deep and circular pit, and this fall has actually saved his life.

Later, the narrator escapes the pendulum by rubbing the oil and fat from the meat left for him onto the ligaments that bind him beneath the weapon and allowing the rats to come and gnaw on them until he is free. He sees that he

had not counted in vain upon their voracity. Observing that [he] remained without motion, one or two of the boldest leaped upon the framework, and smelt at the surcingle. This seemed the signal for a general rush.

After several minutes he realizes that the rats have freed him from his binds! The final danger he faces is the heating and movement of the walls that would seem to compel him to jump into the pit. He says that the room grew flatter and flatter" like a "lozenge" quite rapidly so that he barely has time to think. Just as he is about to fall, he is saved.

The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's story is being held captive and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition. As an arm of the Catholic Church, the Inquisition was primarily occupied with verifying the religious faith of Moors and Jews who claimed to have converted to Catholicism. However, as the Inquisition gained more power, it cast a net over those whom it perceived as threats, so the narrator could have been a political prisoner rather than a heretic. The story does not specify the charge for which the narrator was found guilty and sentenced.

When the narrator is first imprisoned in his cell, he finds himself in utter darkness. He attempts to measure the size of his chamber by feeling his way around the perimeter. At one point, however, he trips and finds his face hanging out over a pit. He realizes if he had tried walking across his cell he would likely have fallen into the deep pit. He knows the pit is very deep, and the fall might have killed him, but he speculates that if he had not died from the fall, he would have been eaten alive by the rats that live in the well. Falling on his face was a blessing that no doubt saved his life.

The man is able to escape from the pendulum because of those very rats, ravenous as they are. He has been given food which he can reach with a hand--that allows him to survive during the days the pendulum is descending. He must constantly shoo the rats away from his food. His bonds are cloth rather than metal. He gets the idea to smear his food onto his bonds wherever he can reach them; the rats then eat through his bonds and he slips off the platform just as the pendulum has reached him.

The final danger he faces is the danger of the hot moving walls that press in on him, pushing him toward the pit. He is rescued by General Lasalle just as the walls have brought him right to the brink of the fearsome pit.

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" is famously cited for its ability to evoke a sense of dread within the reader. One of the few tales of Poe's that actually has a relatively "happy" ending, this story centers around a man who is sentenced to a torturous death during the Spanish Inquisition.

At the beginning of the story, the narrator appears to be very delirious. He claims that he is "sick unto death with that long agony" and that his senses leave him as he is sentenced to die. This beginning is very impactful because it starts the story with immediate foreshadowing of the dark matter that is to come; the reader is immediately told of the conflict of the story. The narrator is sentenced to die, and that experience alone is enough to make any man mentally unstable. The narrator describes his state as "delirious horror" and cannot even hear the words that are spoken by the court that decides his fate. His state of panic foreshadows the desperation that he will possess later in the story when he is confronted with the torture chamber and the many efforts to destroy him.

Allowing six lines for the introductory quatrain and its translation, lines 8–13 of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" encompass approximately this section of the story:

I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence—the dread sentence of death—was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution—perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill-wheel. This only for a brief period, for presently I heard no more.

From this passage, we can deduce that the narrator is fully conscious at first. Since he feels his senses leaving, he was aware of his mental state and surroundings initially. He hears his death sentence distinctly. However, whether from mental distress at hearing the pronouncement or from some sort of physical trauma or both, he fades into a state of semi-consciousness. He is not completely unconscious, for he has a vague perception of the voices of the inquisitors and associates the "dreamy indeterminate hum" of their speech with a mill wheel. From that point, he loses more consciousness without completely passing out, for he "heard no more," even though he continues to visualize the proceedings without properly interpreting what he sees.

In this passage, the narrator moves from being fully conscious to losing some consciousness (his ability to understand speech) to losing more consciousness (his ability to hear and to correctly interpret visual stimuli). In this section, however, he never fully loses consciousness but remains in a state of semi-consciousness.

Lines 8-13 will differ depending on how the text has been printed in a particular book that contains this Poe story.  I will have to analyze the first paragraph of the story to make sure that I get these lines.  

Physiologically, the change in the man's consciousness is an easy question.  He is conscious when the paragraph begins, and he is unconscious when the paragraph ends. 

However, I believe that the question is probably asking about the man's psychological state of mind. He starts off okay.  He's scared when the paragraph begins, but he's in control of his mind; however, that doesn't last long.  The text tells us that he felt his senses leaving him.  

I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me.

His physical senses start blurring the lines of reality and unreality.  He clearly sees the judges, and he hears their verdict, but after that his mind starts playing tricks on him.  He sees the candles that are on the table, and he envisions them as angels. The angels then transform from beautiful signs of hope to "meaningless spectres" with flaming heads.  It's at this moment that he acknowledges to himself that death might be good and restful. 

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

The narrator's final thoughts convey his knowledge that he's losing consciousness.  That's why the figures in the room seem to disappear along with the light.  

At the end of the first paragraph, the narrator swoons.  

If you are like my students, they do not immediately know what "swoon" means. It means to faint, to lose consciousness, to pass out, and/or to black out.  

The reader does not know for sure that the narrator has lost consciousness until the reader reads the first sentence of the second paragraph.  At the start of that paragraph, the narrator flat out announces that he "had swooned."

Swooning does carry a slightly different connotation than a simple passing out.  When a person swoons, it is often because of an emotional overload.  Having the narrator swoon at the end of the first paragraph makes perfect sense, because the narrator has just been sentenced to death.  From the moment that his death sentence is pronounced, the narrator starts to lose touch with reality.  He admits that he no longer hears specific words. 

The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum.

By the end of the paragraph, the narrator is hallucinating and wishing for death. 

And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave.

His mind simply can't handle everything that is going on, so he swoons.  

The narrator of the story is in prison in Toledo, Spain. He is a victim of the Inquisition. He is in complete darkness. He attempts to discover the type of dungeon he is in by walking around the exterior of the room to find its perimeter.  As he walks, he discovers that it appears to be circular in shape, but he has no way to mark where he started from.  This is when he tears off a piece of his garment to lay on the floor.  He continues his walk around the wall to arrive back at the torn rag on the floor.

Next he decides to go across the floor.  He stumbles and falls face first on the floor because the rag is entangled in his feet.  This saves him from the pit which is directly in front of his face.  If he had taken a few more steps, he would have stepped right off the edge and landed at the bottom.

After awakening from a drug induced sleep, he found himself strapped down to a wooden platform with a pendulum swinging above him. He used the food to lure the rats from the pit to chew through the ropes that held him.  Once he escaped the pendulum, he was free, but still in the prison.

He is saved just before being forced into the pit by the walls of the cell being heated and getting closer and closer so that he had no choice but to go down into the pit.

It is a great short story that should not take more than 20 or 30 minutes to read.  I encourage you to read the story for yourself.

The first time that sleep overtakes the narrator is during his effort to circumnavigate the walls of his dungeon and thus find out how large it is. When he wakes up, he finds a loaf and a jug of water beside him, which indicates that he has been observed or inspected as he slept, and shows us how carefully his keepers are watching him.

The second time he sleeps is after he discovers by accident that there is a hidden pit in the center of his dungeon, but escapes falling into it when he accidentally trips before reaching its edge. Again, when he wakes up, he finds a loaf and water beside him. However, this time, the food and drink appear to be drugged, so that his keepers can manipulate him freely while he is unconscious. They bind him to a "low framework of wood" which is intended to hold him in a fixed position as the pendulum slowly descends from the ceiling and cuts him in half.

The intervals of sleep thus serve as punctuation to the narrator's ordeal, allowing the narrator's keepers to first challenge him with the pit, and then with the pendulum.

After spending the bulk of the story building suspense centered on the narrator's predicament, Poe utilizes the deus ex machina literary technique to free the narrator from the prison where he has been tortured.

Deus ex machina is a device that authors use to resolve a seemingly unsolvable conflict in a story. It derives from an expression that means "god from the machine" and was used in early Greek plays when an actor playing a god or goddess intervened to end the conflict, typically by being hoisted onstage by a crane, or "machine."

At the end of "The Pit and the Pendulum," General LaSalle from the French army catches the narrator's outstretched arm and pulls him to safety. The French have come to liberate Toledo from the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.

For a while, the narrator did a pretty good job of saving himself. He was lucky enough not to fall into the pit while he was exploring the pitch black cell, as he fell to the ground close enough to realize the pit existed but not so close that he fell in. Also, when he woke to find himself tied down, he saved himself by spreading what was left of his food onto the ropes holding him down, thereby enticing the rats to eat through the ropes and help him free just before the pendulum could cut into him. However, when the walls literally start closing in around him, slowly forcing him towards the pit, his end seems near, but just as he is about to fall in, a hand grabs his arm: General Lasalle of the French army has arrived to end the branch of the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo, and he was just in time to save the narrator from falling to his death.

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a prisoner who is being tortured and tormented as part of the Spanish Inquisition. He tells us that he is in a room, in the dark, and he is obviously being watched by his inquisitors. His thinking is fuzzy and unclear, but he is able to describe his condition and his surroundings well enough for us to know he is in trouble and he is being watched.

He is awake and then he passes out again several times; eventually he is awake enough to try to measure the dimensions of his cell by groping his way along the wall. He is not able to use a particularly scientific method, but he does manage to work his way around the perimeter--or so he thinks. The next thing he decides to do is walk across the cell or room. 

At first I proceeded with extreme caution, for the floor although seemingly of solid material was treacherous with slime. At length, however, I took courage and did not hesitate to step firmly--endeavouring to cross in as direct a line as possible. I had advanced some ten or twelve paces in this manner, when the remnant of the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs. I stepped on it, and fell violently on my face.

It takes him a bit to realize something significant, but eventually he does: while his chin is on the floor, the rest of his face hanging over a ledge and is touching nothing. 

At the same time, my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy vapour, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose to my nostrils. I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit....

It is still black as midnight in the room and he has no way of knowing what is in the pit or how far down it goes; however, he drops a little piece of cement down the pit and it falls for a very long time until it finally lands with a splash into some water and then echoes. 

If he had not tripped and fallen on his face, he would have walked right into the pit and been gone forever. As it is, the narrator hears his inquisitors react to his fall. Obviously they are disappointed that he is still alive, and the next time their prisoner is sleeping, they begin a new torture--the pendulum. 

During his sentencing and right after, the narrator is incredibly groggy and confused.  He can't see very clearly, and almost appears to be having hallucinations--he fixates on the candles in the room, thinking they are angels of light coming to save him.  The voices of the judges are distorted.  Then, he "swoons" and goes on for 2 paragraphs about dreams, hallucinations, and a very confused, almost altered state of consciousness before he wakes up in the dark prison.

His descriptions of his state--"I was sick, sick unto death," and "I felt that my senses were leaving me," and "dreamy indeterminate hum," his confused visions and state of mind, all seem to point to him being drugged.  His being drugged, and probably being very emotional and stressed from the situation, led to him swooning, or, fainting.  In this state, eyes closed, partially conscious, he can't see anything anymore, and remains that way until he wakes in his dungeon of a prison.  That is why he can't see anything, and then of course, when he wakes, his prison is pitch black, so he can't see even when fully alert, conscious and looking around.  His persecutors drugged him, and carried him down into his dungeon, to enact further torment.

I hope that those thoughts helped; good luck!

Unfortunately, there is no absolute answer to this question, as Poe never specifically states what the narrator is guilty of. However, Poe does leave enough clues for us to make an educated guess: he he gives us the location and the circumstance, thereby telling us the time period, and he tells us the method.

On multiple occasions, the narrator mentions the Inquisition. Now, there were multiple Inquisitions at one point or another; there was also a Portuguese Inquisition and a Roman Inquisition, but by mentioning Toledo, we can know that it is the Spanish. At the beginning, the narrator mentions something called an auto-da-fe, which he says is how those condemned to die were executed. Toledo did have quite a few auto-da-fe, so that confirms things more. And by telling us at the end that General Lasalle saved the narrator, Poe tells us that it is sometime at the beginning of the 19th century.

As for what the narrator was guilty of, the auto-da-fe was usually the penance for condemned heretics and apostates (someone who spoke against the church's beliefs and someone who separated themselves from the church respectively), so we can be fairly certain that the narrator was guilty of one of those things.

There is no real "correct" answer to this question, unfortunately, but there are some things that can be speculated upon. For instance, at the end of the story, the narrator is saved from his death in the pit by the Frenchman General Lasalle. The narrator tells us that General Lasalle was a part of the French army, and that army had taken over his prison, the city of Toledo, and apparently the Inquisition (of course, by saying “The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies”, the narrator could just mean the branch of the Inquisition in that particular city, or he could mean the Inquisition in its entirety—either way, it is not historically accurate). But considering he was saved from his death initially, it is more than likely that he is saved from death permanently, so the narrator was probably questioned about his time in the prison and then allowed to return home.

Of course, as I said, nothing is certain—this is all merely speculation.