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Sensory Details
Poe emphasizes the horror of the narrator’s plight with extensive use of sensory imagery, particularly sound, touch, and scent. These vivid descriptions heighten the tension, forcing the reader deeper into the narrator’s journey. In the darkness of the chamber, the narrator describes the sliminess of the walls, the cold of the stone, and the fungal smell of the pit. He highlights the depth of the pit by describing the sound of a rock falling and how it echoes. As the pendulum sinks nearer, the narrator notes its metallic scent and its hissing sound. Poe brings this hissing noise to the reader’s ears with the sibilant sounds in words like abyss, cessation, crescent, and scimitar. The disturbing descriptions of the rats’ “cold lips” and “thronging pressure” conjure a sense of claustrophobia that’s relieved once the bonds are loosened. The narrator can even smell the heated iron of the false walls as the monks try to force him to his doom. Sound brings the story to its climax, as the narrator’s scream of agony soon becomes the sound of trumpets announcing Lasalle’s arrival.
Hell Imagery
The narrator often associates the Inquisition and its torments with hell, both to condemn the Inquisition’s brutality and to display their hypocrisy in claiming to speak for heaven. Phrases like “subterranean world of darkness,” which is used to describe the prison, are also applicable to hell. The pit in the center of the room evokes the plummet down to hell. The light from beneath the chamber’s fake walls is described as sulfurous, like brimstone. The depictions of torture on the false walls are reminiscent of depictions of demons tormenting the souls of hell. This similarity is underscored when the monks heat the walls, making the eyes on the painting glow like those of demons. The heated walls soon have the luminosity of flames, again like the fires of hell. On top of these descriptive links, the narrator also makes the equivalence explicit. He describes the motion of the pendulum as hellish, the pit as “typical of hell,” and the monks who watch him as demons.
Loss of Consciousness
The narrator loses consciousness multiple times throughout the story, enhancing the tale’s nightmarish atmosphere. He swoons immediately after learning that the Inquisition has sentenced him to death. The narrator lingers over his description of coming back from this initial blackout, as if desiring to avoid focusing on the reality of his situation. He collapses from exhaustion in the middle of mapping the chamber, and then again not long after discovering the pit. The monks drug him after this, causing him to black out again before he wakes up to find himself bound beside the pit. Finally, he faints yet again after losing hope and believing himself lost to the pendulum. These swoons seem to be an attempt for the narrator to protect himself from a reality too terrible to face fully conscious. They also simulate a death that comes with the loss of hope. When the narrator faints for the last time, he does so immediately after being unable to formulate a plan for escape, a situation he describes as an inability to hold on to a faint hope. Without this hope, the narrator’s chance of survival fades, and he slips into a temporary deathlike state.
