The Pit and the Pendulum

“I WAS sick -- sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence -- the dread sentence of death -- was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears.” – The Pit and the Pendulum

In my opinion this is the most filled quotation out of all the Poe's stories that I have read, not only does it create doubt in the author through giving us the idea that he is becoming disoriented and how, it also creates suspense by giving the reader doubt that the prisoner may not make it out of the death sentence at all. This leads the story to fill the conventions of the gothic by creating an unreliable narrator as well as stimulating fear within the reader as they become fearful for the prisoner's life and in the end, defines the conventions of gothic literature.