The Pit and the Pendulum

The Pit and the Pendulum Summary | The Pit and the Pendulum Summary

The narrator begins with a disjointed account of what appears to be his sentence at the hands of the Inquisition. He drifts in and out of consciousness, pondering how restful death would be. He then describes parts of his trial, remembers a period of feeling and thinking nothing, then of forgetting.

When he is seemingly in his right mind, he begins by saying that now that he is in his place of punishment, he has not yet opened his eyes. He is not tied up, and he is lying on his back. When he does open his eyes, his worst fears are realized - he can see nothing. He is lying in complete and utter darkness. He does not know or cannot remember his sentence, but he knows that those condemned to death are usually killed soon after they are convicted.

His next fear soon engulfs his mind - what if he has been buried alive? He crawls around a bit, and having established that he does seem to be in a room and not a tomb, he feels some sense of relief. He knows that the end result of his punishment will be death, just not what manner of death.

He tries to ascertain information about his surroundings, outstretching his hands to touch the walls around him. He tears a piece of material from his garment and places it at a right angle to the wall, planning to use its position to help him calculate the approximate size of his cell. He underestimates his own weakness, as well as the slipperiness of the floor, and falls down. He is very tired so he stays on the floor, and falls asleep. When he awakens, he finds he has been given some bread and water. He then resumes his walk around the cell, finally encountering the torn material he had left as a marker and estimating the room is about 50 yards around. He realizes there is no real object to his curiosity, he just needs to occupy his mind with something.

Feeling a burst of courage, the narrator leaves the safety of the walls and tries walking across directly; he promptly trips over his robe and falls. Dazed at first, he soon realizes he has fAllan at the brink of a circular pit. He is able to dislodge a small piece of masonry, and he drops it into the pit in order to determine the depth of the pit. His action draws the attention of his captors, who open an overhead door slightly. A small shaft of light comes in, revealing the details of the room.

Knowing how close he had come to a horrible death leaves the narrator shaking and trembling. He is very agitated but is eventually able to fall asleep. When he wakes up, he again finds bread and water, but immediately after he drinks the water he feels drugged and falls into a deep sleep.

He awakens again, and there is a little more light in the room. He had greatly overestimated its size, and its shape is much more square than he had thought. He is now tied down on his back. There are also designs painted on the walls; one is a picture representing Time holding a pendulum - the pendulum is real. The narrator notices at this point that there are rats on the floor, crawling all around. Also, he notices that the pendulum is moving down and its sweep has increased; since he avoided the first death, his captors have devised this new fate. When he comprehends his predicament, a plan begins to form. He realizes he can use the rats to his advantage; if he rubs some food onto his bindings, the rats will chew through them. This plan works, and he escapes just as the pendulum is about to chop him in half.

After this second escape from death, the narrator notices that the pictures on the wall seem to be glowing - the iron walls are heating up. The heat almost drives him to throw himself into the water in the pit, but he suddenly sees something unspeakably horrible in the pit that stops him. He discovers that the room is getting smaller, and that the new death plan is to force him into the pit.

Finally, as all hope is lost and he is about to give up and plunge to his death, he hears voices from above, and he faints and is pulled out as the walls recede. It is General Lasalle and the French army, rescuing him from the Inquisition.