Reflection - Pit and the Pendulum

It is not surprising that Edgar Allen Poe wrote this short story. I actually really liked this story, but it includes many characteristics of the Dark Romanticism period. It includes many eerie and tragic things and acknowledges the existence of evil. This story is about a soldier from the Spanish Inquisition, who is sentenced to death. He is held in a cell where the walls kind of move, forcing him into this deep pit. As, I said before, this is something that Edgar Allen Poe would definitely write because many of his other short stories include things like torture and death. The Dark Romanticism period is very imaginative and descriptive, which is something that I notice throughout The Pit and the Pendulum. For example, in the story, Poe says things like,

"They were wild, bold, ravenous;their
red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited
for motionlessness on my part to make me
their prey" (Poe 271).

This is scary and pretty descriptive.I like how he does this when he tells his stories because it is much more interesting and actually, normally the stories that I read are not that creepy, but I feel like the more detail you use, the better the story turns out to be. That is why I really liked this story. Another descriptive and scary quote from the book would be this one.

"Oh! For a voice to speak-oh! horror!-
oh any horror but this! With a shriek
I rushed from the margin and buried my
face in my hands, weeping bitterly" (Poe 273).

Throughout the story, being that it is very descriptive, Edgar Allen Poe tells us many things about the soldier and how he is feeling when he is and the cell and stuff. That is yet another reason why I liked this story more than some other stories. I liked it because it tells you about how the soldier was feeling about his experiences, which also sometimes makes it more intense and creepy. An example from the story would be something like this quote.

"Upon my recovery too, I felt very-oh
irrepressibly sick and weak, as if
through long inanition" (Poe 270).
And also,

"I grew frantically mad and struggled to force
myself upward against the sweep of the fearful
scimitar. And then I lay silently calm, and I
lay smiling at the glittery death, as a child
at some rare bauble" (Poe 269).

I think that Edgar Allen Poe is considered to be very famous still because of his great story telling. I think he is so popular because he uses he perfect amount of scary images and eerie story lines, to still kind of having that imaginative, kind of Romanticism feel to it. Hence, the genre being Dark Romanticism. I thought that The Pit and the Pendulum was a very good story and I really enjoyed reading it. I hope that we can read some more of Edgar Allen Poe's stories. They would be really fun to discuss and talk about.

Poe, Edger Allan. "The Pit and the Pendulum." Glencoe Literature. By Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Douglas Fisher. New York: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2009. 263-73. Print.