Pit and the Pendulum Journal

Poe makes this short story really good with two different styles, he uses a varied sense of time In this story, and he also uses the first person narration to Improve upon the thrill and suspense of this short story. This varied sense of time gives mystery to the story, as neither we, the audience, nor the narrator seem to know exactly how much time passes each time the narrator goes unconscious, and It appeared to me that a very long interval of time had since elapsed. Poe 2). This quote shows that the narrator has a slight sense of time, but since he has no watch, he cannot accurately perceive the time elapsed with each time he goes unconscious, he only uses the fact that his surroundings change after he wakes up. The first person narration also adds to the quality of this story as it gives mystery, perspective, and it even lets us predict to some extent. The mystery is in that we only know what the narrator knows, so we are somewhat as clueless to what is occurring as he is.

The perspective Is good because we are given all of his thoughts and this gives us reasoning to his actions, without such reasoning the story would be much more difficult to understand. The first person narration also gives us a sense of what Is going to happen, “They appeared to me white – whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words. ” (1). This tells us that the narrator survives through the story because he is writing the story for us on paper, therefore he could not have died in this torture chamber.