Student Question
What is the narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum" dreading at the story's start?
Quick answer:
At the story's start, the narrator dreads his execution, having been condemned to death during the Spanish Inquisition. This fear overwhelms him, causing a loss of consciousness. Upon awakening, he also dreads total darkness, fearing it more than seeing something horrific. The oppressive blackness of his surroundings heightens his anxiety, as he struggles to breathe and feels stifled by the intensity of the darkness.
At the very beginning of the story, the narrator is dreading his own execution. He has been put on trial for unknown crimes during the Spanish Inquisition, and in the first few lines of the story we hear the pronouncement of his sentence – “the dread sentence of death.” He has been condemned, and upon hearing the result of his trial, his senses leave him – he can see the judge, see the judge’s lips pronouncing our narrator’s fate, but sees them morphed into grotesque caricatures. He can at first hear the words spoken at the trial in a murmur, as “the burr of a mill wheel,” but soon he ceases to process all sound. And it seems that the “decree…[was] still issuing from those lips” long after the simple decision of death need have been pronounced. We can assume that the judge is giving the details for the long...
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bouts of torture the narrator would soon have to endure.
At this realization the narrator has a new dread – the prolongation of his fate – and begins to imagine “what sweet rest there must be in the grave.” Soon after this thought sneaks into his mind he loses consciousness, only to awake to a nightmarish ordeal.
What does the narrator dread at the start of "The Pit and the Pendulum"?
Within the opening five paragraphs of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Pit
and the Pendulum," there are a couple of different things that
the narrator dreads: The first is the death sentence; the
second is total darkness.
The narrator, after having suffered a great deal during the Spanish
Inquisition, barely has full control of his faculties in the opening paragraph
when his death sentence is given. He is even fading in and out
of consciousness, as we see when he says, "The sentence--the dread sentence of
death--was the last of distinct accentuation which reached [his] ears." He then
proceeds to describe in many details just how horrifying it
was to observe the judges pronounce the death sentence; he was
only able to observe it because his ability to truly hear anything had already
left him due to his state of terror. Prior to the sentence, he had seen
the "seven tall candles" standing before the judges as rescuing angels. Yet, as
the sentence was pronounced, he grew nauseous, "felt every fibre in [his] frame
thrill," and then saw the candles as ghosts, "meaningless spectres, with heads
of flame," that would not help him. Then to his horror, the candles
were extinguished, leaving him in total darkness in which he again
lost consciousness but regained it only well enough to sense himself being
carried downwards, for a very long time, to what appears to be a dungeon.
When he gained consciousness in the dungeon, he began dreading opening
his eyes because he was too afraid of not being able to see anything
at all. As he explains, "It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible,
but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see." When he finally
does open his eyes, his worst dreaded fear is confirmed, as we
see in the following lines:
The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close.
Hence, as we can see, the two greatest things he dreads within the first five paragraphs are the death sentence and total darkness.
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