The Pit and the Pendulum

The terrible pit in the middle of the narrator’s dungeon represents fear. For much of the story, the pit remains a dark mystery; while it promises horror and death, there’s no sense of what might be down there. But at the very end, as the walls literally close in around the narrator and force him toward the edge, he looks down into it and sees the absolute worst thing he can imagine, the deepest possible horror: “Oh! for a voice to speak!—oh! horror!—oh! any horror but this!” (256)

We never learn what that worst possible thing is. But that’s precisely the point. Most of the narrator’s agony, all through this story, has been psychological dread. The unknown contents of the pit allow us to see our own worst fears in the bottom—and thus to feel a queasy empathy with the narrator’s pain. Anticipating, imagining, and dreading the worst possible thing, the image of the pit suggests, might be an even deeper horror than experiencing it.

In a way, the pit is a mirror of the dungeon, which, like the pit, is deep in the earth and has dread at the bottom. Both of these terrible holes figure a basic human predicament: everyone, after all, has felt a “pit of dread” in their insides at one point or another.