Underneath its ropes and rats, its tensions and extraordinary machineries, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the story of the soul struggling with the tortures of an indifferent universe. It is a tale of unmatchable horror—as it is equally a tale of all but unmatchable endurance. In the context of Poe’s work as a whole, both the “eternal night” and the narrator’s solitude are elements that make of the pit’s chamber an even more terrible tableau. In the blackness of the pit there is nothing—and no one. Not even the eye with the blue veil.
