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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“The Pit and the Pendulum” is famous for its excruciatingly vivid description of pure dread. Almost nothing actually happens to the narrator in this dungeon—it almost happens, and that’s precisely where the horror lies.
The worst thing in the world, Poe suggests, isn’t to die, but to fear death and the suffering that might attend death. Or perhaps more subtly, it’s to fear that fear, to experience fear feeding on itself. The narrator of this story makes it clear that fear is utterly absorbing, destabilizing, and even dehumanizing. It can undo a person to the extent that they long for death. If that’s true, one hardly needs an Inquisitorial dungeon to go through some of the world’s worst tortures: One’s own mind can do the job perfectly well on its own.
It’s possible to read this entire story as a kind of dream-vision. The long passage about dreams and unconsciousness early on in the story makes poetic and even optimistic claims for the unconscious, arguing that a close connection with the unconscious mind is the precursor of art, and the purview of only a chosen few.
But in the rest of the story, the ability to see those mid-air visions comes at a tremendous cost.
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
Edgar Allan Poe
Annabel Lee
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
Edgar Allan Poe
Hop-Frog
Edgar Allan Poe
Ligeia
Edgar Allan Poe
Tamerlane
Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe
The Cask of Amontillado
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The Conqueror Worm
Edgar Allan Poe
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe
The Gold Bug
Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunted Palace
Edgar Allan Poe
The Imp of the Perverse
Edgar Allan Poe
The Lake
Edgar Allan Poe
The Man of the Crowd
Edgar Allan Poe
The Masque of the Red Death
Edgar Allan Poe
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Edgar Allan Poe
The Oval Portrait
Edgar Allan Poe
Allegories of Modern Life
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Fantasy
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Fantasy & Science Fiction Books (High...
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Fear
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Horror, Thrillers, & Suspense
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Mortality & Death
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Mystery & Crime
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Psychology
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Romanticism / Romantic Period
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Safety & Danger
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