What is fear? Is being in a prison so dark that a person cannot see ahead? In this complete darkness, the narrator finds himself eating and drinking, then passing out on a cold ground. When he wakes up, he is elsewhere in the dark cell. Or is it a cell? Could this be a tomb? Just when he thinks the cell is so big, he almost finds himself in an abyss. He eats and sleeps again. Where and how will he wake up? Does he wake up from his drugged food? In this story “The Pit and the Pendulum”, by Edgar Allan Poe, he recounts the terrifying struggle of a man confronted with fear, torture and confinement. In this total darkness, the main character has no idea where he is. Could it be a tomb, or is he in prison waiting to be hanged? The unknown narrator shows his fear from the opening of the story when he states: "I was sick to death, with this long agony, and when they finally tied me up and I was allowed to m As I sat down, I felt my senses leaving me. » (Poe 1.) He felt this every time he took a drink of the little water he had left. He drank it, fell asleep and woke up somewhere else. When he feels the walls begin to close in on him and he is about to fall into an abyss, he realizes that the water he has been drinking is drugged. It's when he gets up that he realizes he's in a dark cell with a deep pit in the middle. At the bottom of the pit is water. “And then, like a rich note of music, the thought of the sweet rest which there must be in the grave crept into my imagination.” (Poe 2.) The character begins to wonder why am I here? Am I going to die here without knowing why? No one told him why he was taken away and placed in a dark cell. He knew it was the Spanish Inquisition but as far as he was concerned he... middle of paper ... every day, in fear, they seem to lose touch with reality. Our minds are so fragile; it doesn't take much to make them break. We can see and hear things that aren't really there. Our imagination can sometimes get the better of us. Is this what happened to the character in “The Pit and the Pendulum?” » Was he crazy? Works Cited Poe, Edgar Allen. “The pit and the pendulum”. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Pit and the Pendulum. Mankato, Minnesota: Creative Education, 1980. PrintBlooms Literacy Reference Online. Facts on file. Internet. March 2010. Giordano, Robert. “A short biography of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).” June 27, 2005. March 8, 2007 Cherokee High School. :Literary reference center:. EBSCO host. Internet. March 7, 2010. http://web.ebscohost.com/lrc/Web. March 31. 2010. .