The Pit and the Pendulum

At the beginning of the story, the narrator pauses the narrative of his trial for a long reflection on human consciousness. He insists that people are somehow conscious even after they’ve fainted, considers the relationship of fainting to dreams and death, and lays out his belief that those who are prone to fainting are also in the closest contact with their imaginations. In fainting, the narrator “finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow,” and his sensitive, inventive subconscious mind makes his later suffering so acute (247).

This moment when the narrator steps away from his immediate experience to philosophize prompts us to read “The Pit and the Pendulum” through the lens of the imagination, sleep, and dreams, and perhaps even to read the story itself as a kind of dream-narrative.

The narrator’s ordeal has an inherently dreamlike, symbolic quality. He’s in darkness deep underground—an image that recalls descending into sleep, or into the grave (where, he insists, consciousness persists).

Then he confronts symbolic threats. First, he has to deal with the darkness and the feeling that he might stumble into a trap—in other words, with the terror of the uncontrollable and unknown, descriptions that bring to mind the subconscious.