The Tormented Life of Edgar Allan Poe

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The Tormented Life of Edgar Allan Poe
The Nightmarish Mind of Edgar Allan Poe

• The Short Life 1809-1849

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• Background

• Born 1809-1849
• His mother died during his youth and his father
  abandoned them
• After the death of his grandmother married his
  13-year-old cousin, Virginia in 1835
• Virginia died in 1847
• Poe died in 1849

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• Education of Poe

• Entered into and dropped from both the University
  of Virginia and West Point
• Ran into serious debt and started borrowing
  money, gambling and getting deeper
• into debt

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• Writing Style of Poe

• Wrote in a Gothic Style
• Deep and intense
• Explorations of ? world of dream and of nightmare
• In his stories the past is darker, m?r? ominous
  and oppresses his heroes and heroines

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• Poes Characters

• Many of his characters ?r? filled with madness
• Obsessed with the irrational side of the mind

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• The Pit and the Pendulum
• The Fall of the House of Usher
• Tell-Tale Heart
• The Cask of Amontillado
• The Masque of the Red Death
• The Raven
• Lenore

• Famous Works
• Short Stories
• Poems

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Edgar Allan Poe's
The Pit
Pendulum
and the
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• General Information

• "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a short story about
  the horrors of undergoing torture.
• Poe completed it in August 1842 and published it
  the following year.

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• General Information
• Setting

• City of Toledo in central Spain during the time
  of the Inquisition.
• The Inquisition was established in 1478 to combat
  any opinion against Catholicism
• The Inquisition often used its power to
  intimidate or eliminate its political opponents,
  as well as to identify and punish religious
  dissenters.

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Literary Elements

• Poe carefully makes every word, every phrase,
  every sentence in the story contribute to the
  overall effect of horror and suspense
• figure of speech involving repetition of a
  consonant soundoccurs
• In their voracity, the vermin frequently fastened
  their sharp fangs in my fingers.

• Word Choice
• Alliteration

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Literary Elements

• Simile / Metaphor / Personification

• Poe uses comparisons to bring his images to life.
  Here are some examples of his comparisons in
  action
• And there stole into my fancy, like a rich
  musical note, the thought of what sweet rest
  there must be in the grave. (Simile) 
• In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose
  jaws I had escaped. (Metaphor Personification) 
  

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• Themes and Focus

• Mans fear
• Mans struggle to survive
• The mental psychology of torture
• The physical toll of torture
• The treatment of those who are perceived to break
  societys rules

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• Summary and Plot Overview

• An unnamed narrator opens the story by revealing
  that he has been sentenced to death during the
  time of the Inquisition
• The Inquisition was an institution of the
  Catholic government in fifteenth- and
  sixteenth-century Spain that persecuted all
  Protestants and heretical Catholics.

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• Summary and Plot Overview

• To the narrators dismay he discovers in the
  center of his pitch dark prison cell is a
  circular pit.
• He later is tied to a wooden board. Above him
  swings a great pendulum heading to his heart.
  Below him, from the pit comes something almost
  equally repulsive.
• Like a rat in a cage, the narrator must make
  decisions that may or may not mean his survival.

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• Character Analysis
• Narrator
• Inquisitors

• Told from a first person point of view, the
  unnamed person tells of the torture inflicted on
  him by the Spanish Inquisition.
• He identifies himself as a person who refuses to
  conform to established rules and refuses to yield
  to the established authority. 
• Black-robed judges who sentence the narrator.