The Pit and the Pendulum

The nameless Narrator doesn’t tell us much about himself directly, but he reveals a lot through his description of his ordeal, and through his reflections on the unconscious and the imagination.

Early in the story, the narrator says that those who faint are those who are closely in touch with the subconscious worlds and the imagination:

He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower; is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention (247).

The narrator himself is a champion fainter, swooning five or six times over the course of this story. His frequent journeys to the world of the unconscious make his sufferings extra acute.

Most of the narrator’s torture plays not on physical discomfort but on the imagination: The speaker is left in utter darkness to imagine horrors, he watches a swinging blade creep steadily down toward him over the course of days, and he knows that at any moment he could be forced into a pit that contains his deepest fears.