The Pit and the Pendulum

The swinging blade that agonizingly descends toward the trapped narrator over the course of days is an image of dread and anxiety, the horror of the awful thing that hasn’t happened quite yet. But more specifically, it stands for the terror of mortality itself. Designed to look like the swinging scythe of Old Father Time, and moving like a grandfather clock’s pendulum, the blade brings death closer and closer to the narrator by the second. This, of course, is exactly what’s happening to every living person, all the time: Inevitable death ticks closer moment by moment.

The swing of the pendulum makes the time symbolism particularly clear. The back-and-forth, tick-tock motion of the pendulum literally measures the relentless passage of time.

The special horror of the pendulum is that the narrator has to be aware of his impending death. He can see how close death is; eventually, he can even smell the “odor of the sharp steel” as the blade swishes past (253). Trapped beneath the pendulum, the narrator confronts his mortality every second of every day. In this symbolic reading, the story is about mental imprisonment: The narrator is trapped in the horror of impending death, “buried alive” in his mental anguish and unable to look away from doom as it inches ever closer.