“Summary and Analysis "The Pit and the Pendulum”The story begins with the trial of the narrator, as he sits before seven very severe judges; he is "sick — sick unto death," because the judges have an "immoveable resolution — of stern contempt of human torture." The narrator is so completely obsessed by the horror of the proceedings that he cannot even hear his sentence as it is being pronounced; instead, he recalls all the horrible tales of "monkish tortures" which awaited the victims of the Inquisition. After swooning, the narrator awakens in total darkness; before opening his eyes, he imagines the horrors that await him. At last, his worse fears are confirmed: "The blackness of eternal night encompassed me." At first, he wonders if he is dead yet still mentally conscious. This concept often appears in Poe's fiction — that is,a person will be physically dead, but he will still retain the mental ability to know things after the death of the physical body.After many moments of suspense, he investigates his situation. He knows that he is condemned to death; but the method and the time for his execution are unknown to him. Since he has heard so much about the horrors of the dungeons, he is certain that he is in one of those dungeons. After feeling around, he determines that it is in the shape of a vault. The floors are covered with slime, but carefully feeling his way around, he calculates that the vault is about fifty feet wide. He then begins to traverse the vault, but he slips on the slimy floor and falls. His body hits the floor, and he discovers that his head lies on the perimeter of a seemingly bottomless, circular pit. A few steps more and he would have fallen to a horrible death.
