Horror vs Terror in Poe’s Pit Essay Example

me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me”.

It could be said that it is this exact state of vulnerability and the fact that there is not much information about this character what makes the reader trust and empathize with the narrator from the very beginning. Regarding the scenarios in which these two characters are set it could be argued that both of them seem real and imaginary at the same time. However, The black cat seems to have more fantastical elements which may be confused with supernatural events and gives a sense of unreality and therefore detaches the reader from the story.

Even though the story is mostly settled in the narrator’s house, an ordinary place, extraordinary events take place there. In spite of the fact that the reader is aware of the narrator’s alcoholism and may experience hallucinations, the events are narrated in a way that it is hard to differentiate between what is real and what is not: “One night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment....

It was a black cat --a very large one --fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast”. In the previous extract we see the encounter of the

narrator with a new cat, much alike the previous one. In this exact moment the reader does not know for sure if the cat is real or just a part of the narrator’s imagination. Especially because he still puts emphasis in the legitimacy of the events by saying he is “detailing a chain of facts”.

In view of these facts it is very likely that the reader sees The Black cat filled with fantastical situations and this is what makes the story be taken as such. The same is not true for The pit and the pendulum where the story is settled in a torture chamber during the inquisitorial times in Spain. These specific facts make the story more authentic and leave no space for doubts or ambiguities on the reader’s part. All the events taking place within the chamber, though terrifying, are coherent and in correspondence to the place in which the narrator is placed.

Taking into account the previous descriptions and the definitions of horror and terror we will try to identify which of these stories presents horror and which one may be said to go deeper by portraying terror. The Pit and the pendulum is characterized by having a narrator who seems in absolute use of his mental faculties. As it is mentioned above, this character is aware of what is happening around him and by having a peak of his logical thoughts and feelings the reader experiences the struggle of the narrator to stay alive in a much more personal way.

The fact that this character is sane, integrated and coherent in his thinking is one of the reasons why the reader may sense

the terror of the story on a whole other level. The narrator in this torture chamber is submitted to several kinds of traps and torments: the pit, the rats and the closing walls. He tries to escape from each one of these but every time he succeeds he finds himself in a worse situation than he was before. Inside the chamber he is deprived of the sense of sight so at first he cannot know where he is or what dangers surround him. His will owever compensates for this lack of sight and he tries to use his other senses to find his way around the chamber. Although he is restricted in his ability to act, his mind and senses work together to make action possible. He escapes the pit, and the pendulum only to subsist a more restricted and horrifying situation: “I had but escaped death in one form of agony, to be delivered unto worse than death in some other” . When the closing walls force him towards the pit he is finally limited in his ability to choose; and he knows that not even all his faculties unified are going to help him.

When he seems to find psychic harmony under severe physical and mental pressure he finds that his integrated powers of knowledge, will and feeling will expose his own hopelessness. Every act of balance or sanity from his part only seems to aggravate his situation. This constant mental and physical torture suffered by this sane narrator possibly cause great terror in the reader who empathizes with him every step of the way when trying to overcome the traps in the cell.

The

feeling of anticipation and dread experienced by the narrator during the whole surviving process may cause an anxiety and terror in the reader which The black cat could never produce. In The black cat, the narrator’s approach to the reader is not a very effective one in the sense that he praises and justifies his position and mean actions through a series of irrational ideas: “The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness.

Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife”. In the previous extract we can appreciate how the narrator’s thinking process is altered by something which clearly blocks his rationality. This mental blocking may be attributed to his drinking problem, however he commits so many devilish actions that this character probably cannot be accepted or understood by a regular reader.

The reader will probably never empathize with this character not only because he is mad but also because the story is filled with fantastical elements and these elements are most likely to portray the story as being set far from reality. The arguments presented suggest that The pit and the pendulum produces deep terror all throughout the story while The black cat is essentially constructed to generate horror. Taking into account the previous definitions of horror and terror it may be said that the former plays a superficial role and does not seem to cause

great impact once the story is finished.

On the other hand, the terror portrayed in The pit and the pendulum involves great physical and mental disturbance which seems successfully transmitted to the reader. It is my contention that sanity could function as a link between the narrator and the reader and may allow the reader to identify with the character and fear for him. The narrator in The pit and the pendulum could be replaced by any regular man for we know nothing about the character but still we manage to feel all what he is feeling.

After all, the integrated personality of this narrator survives to experience horrors that the disintegrated personality of the narrator in The black cat never had to face and this is the reason why madness may be measured as less terrifying than sanity.

Bibliography

• Poe, E. A. Tales of mystery and imagination. Everyman’s library, 1993.
• Tzvetan Todorov. A structural approach to a literary genre. The Press of Case Western Reserve University. 1973. * Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Mass. , 1957).
• http://www. eapoe. org/pstudies/ps1960/p1969201. tm#nf05 28/01/2011. [ 1 ]. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Horror_and_terror 29/10/2011 [ 2 ]. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Horror_and_terror 29/10/2011 [ 3 ]. Poe, E. A. Tales of mystery and imagination. Everyman’s library, 1993. Page 564. [ 4 ]. Poe, E. A. Ibid. Page 239. [ 5 ].

Poe, E. A. Tales of mystery and imagination. Everyman’s library, 1993. Page 567. [ 6 ]. Poe, E. A. Ibid. Page 566. [ 7 ]. Poe, E. A. Tales of mystery and imagination. Everyman’s library, 1993. Page 250 [ 8 ]. Poe, E. A. Ibid. Page 570.