by Peter Boysen

Created on: May 19, 2009

History is a highly subjective discipline, often twisted and twirled in the hands of its recorders to suit their particular opinions and agendas. The role of history in Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum is similar to the role of history in such works as the propagandistic cartoons in America during the Second World War to lampoon the Germans and the Japanese and Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice: to take stereotype and use it to entertain. Poe uses common misconceptions about the Spanish Inquisition to make this story compelling and grotesque.

At the beginning of Pit and the Pendulum, an anonymous narrator is hauled before a frightening panel of judges, and is not told why he is there. He receives a death sentence and passes out, only to wake up in a completely dark room. This turns out to be a cell, which he decides to measure by pacing around the perimeter. Eventually, he decides to walk across the center of the room but trips over his shirt hem. When he falls, his face is hanging over open air: the center of this cell turns out to be a deep pit, with water at the bottom.

The next time he wakes up, he is tied to a board with ropes. There is some light in the cell now; this light shows him a picture of Father Time on the ceiling, and a pendulum dangling, swinging back and forth. This pendulum is descending slightly with each swing. The narrator uses the juices from the meat that he had not yet eaten to lure the rats in his cell to chew his ropes. Just as the pendulum swings barely over his chest, he is freed and slides off the board.

The pendulum lifts up, and the walls light up, red-hot, forcing him toward the pit in the center. Instead of just heated bars, though, the hot metal is in the shapes of frightening figures, and demon eyes. Just as he is forced into the pit, though, human voices come from above, the walls recede, and a friendly arm catches him: the French Army has conquered the city of Toledoand overthrown the Spanish Inquisition, and none other than General Lasalle himself has rescued the narrator from certain death.

Most of the history in this story is inaccurate. General Lasalle did not command the French occupation of Toledo: he led in the Peninsular War (1808-1814), in which Napoleon tried to conquer Spain. However, this was the war that ended the Spanish Inquisition; when Spain recovered to beat back the French, the new constitution that was put in place was one of the most liberal in Europe at that time.

Even the epigraph

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