Question

PLEASE HELP ME!!!In the context of pit and the pendulum, how does fear drive action? Cite evidence from this text and other literature, art, or history in your answer.

Answer 1

In the story "The Pit and the Pendulum," Edgar Allan Poe makes use of the narrator's fear while he is being tortured so that readers can identify with him and feel his emotions of anxiety and panic. During the horrific plot, the narrator provides a detailed account of the apprehension he feels going through severe mental and physical pain. For example: he says, "It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me."

A similar device can be found in another short story from Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado," in which the narrator describes exhaustively how he kills another man by immurement: "There came forth in reply only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick–on account of the dampness of the catacombs."