Friday, January 10, 2014

What are two instances of flashbacks or foreshadowing in "The Pit and the Pendulum," and what helped you determine your choices?

In the first paragraph of "The Pit and the Pendulum," Poe foreshadows the coming fate of the narrator symbolically, when, after looking at the candles and imagining them as angels who might save him, the narrator's mind switches, and has this dark and fearful premonition:


"...the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul...

In the first paragraph of "The Pit and the Pendulum," Poe foreshadows the coming fate of the narrator symbolically, when, after looking at the candles and imagining them as angels who might save him, the narrator's mind switches, and has this dark and fearful premonition:



"...the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades."



In the next scene, the narrator is in a black room, as he imagined. Lying there in "a swoon," a half-dream where he, the narrator, tries to piece whatever he can together, he has the following flashback:



"...These shadows of memory tell, indistinctly, of tall figures that lifted and bore me in silence down—down—still down—till a hideous dizziness oppressed me at the mere idea of the interminableness of the descent."



It is indeed a descent which finds the narrator in a very real hell, where soon the swaying pendulum appears, designed to cut him in two.

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