Literary Criticism: The Pit And The Pendulum

This short story is set inside a dark prison slightly illuminated by four tall candles, a pendulum and a deep pit.

The main characters are a man condemned to death without a fair process and members of the Spanish Inquisition.

The main theme is the force of the will to be able to free oneself but above all in divine providence.

During the reading even the reader is anguished, since the narrator's voice is anonymous, each of us is hunted by death, by suffering, of our destiny, a victim of religious who play God, by the human freewill to to cause suffering, and then the terror of the abyss and of death.

The apex is when the slow pendulum is getting ever closer to the prisoner's chest. The edge of the ditch, the darkness, the solitude, the awareness of dying unjustly and divine providence.