The Pit and the Pendulum and 1984

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe is set in the time of the Spanish Inquisition where all Protestants and unorthodox Catholics were persecuted, as well as, physically and mentally tortured to death. The narrator, who is under the sentence of death, is familiar with the common destiny of Inquisition victims. When gazing at the deep gloom, he is disoriented believing he has been prematurely buried; however, when the narrator is able to walk, he realizes he is not in a tomb, but in a dungeon. Exploring the place, he finds a pit and he almost falls into it. After that, he falls asleep in the ground. 

Orwell’s 1984 is about a totalitarian government that controls people’s beliefs and

 behaviours establishing the dos and don’ts even in their private life. The protagonist, Winston Smith, starts writing a diary which lets the reader comprehend the harsh oppression people are suffering at the hands of the leader of the government (a.k.a. the Big Brother) and the Thought Police. Once he meets Julia a co-worker and O’Brien (who is supposedly against the Big Brother). Winston’s rebelliousness transforms him in a victim that is tortured in Room 101.

From my point of view, both the Pit and the Pendulum and 1984 are related as they have some elements of dystopian societies, such as, the dystopia control imposed by regimes of fear and dystopian protagonists who usually feel trapped and struggle to escape.  

First, the dystopian control presented in the Pit and the Pendulum corresponds to a religious and moral control established by the Inquisition. Although this control is not explicitly mentioned in the tale, we could understand (based on historical records as the documentary in the references) that the sins, committed against God, were a terrible offence to the Inquisition’s members. They thought that PAIN was the only way to make these people come back to God. Although we do not know exactly what the narrator did, we can deduce he is being torture to make him confess his sins.  

Almost from the beginning, the narrator is terrified: “My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed.  The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me.”(Poe 6) This is because he knows exactly what has happened to different victims of the Inquisition: “To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors” (Poe 10)

Secondly, the protagonist of the Pit and the Pendulum is clearly a dystopian one, because he is trapped and immobilized. After having fallen asleep, the narrator wakes up and is trapped in a wooden bed. To everyone’s astonishment over the protagonist there was a pendulum, which descended towards him; and round him, there were a lot of huge ravenous rats. It did not matter if the narrator decided to jump into the pit or get sliced in half by the pendulum; he seemed not to be able to shun his fate: death. 

In the case of 1984, the dystopian control presented is related to a technological, totalitarian, as well as, a moral control. “The Big Brother” aims to exercises total power over people’s minds and behaviour.  People are not only being watched the whole time, but also they are being restricted to have friends, to be in love, to have sex, to dates and so on. Another example of this could be the following: “In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable” (Orwell 66)

If someone challenged the hard and fast rules established by the Big Brother, the thought police will arrest that person to send him/her a labour camp or to be tortured in a worst scenario, which can definitely be considered as a regime of fear. The scariest place was Room 101 (a torture chamber where every person’s deepest fear is faced). It caused people such irrational fear that some people reacted as the following:

“'Do anything to me!' he yelled. ’You've been starving me for weeks. Finish it off and let me die.        Shoot me. Hang me. Sentence me to twenty-five years. Is there somebody else you want me to give away? Just say who it is and I'll tell you anything you want. I don't care who it is or what you do to 

them. I've got a wife and three children. The biggest of them isn't six years old. You can take the       whole lot  of them and cut their throats in front of my eyes, and I'll stand by and watch it. But not      Room 101!'”  (Orwell 193)

In the case of Winston, he could also be considered as a dystopian protagonist,because once inside Room   101, he was trapped waiting for some ravenous rats to be released to gnaw off his face, he has already        questioned the existing social system and also he has helped us realized some negative aspects of the society
at that time. 

Room 101 scene in 1894 (movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3U83QLoATU&hd=1

Well, if you are wondering what happened with the narrator in the Pit and the Pendulum, I encourage you to read it! (You can find the link in the references)

Finally, I would like to know if you tally with my ideas or not and if do you think that by and large, governments care about people’s life or just see them as “elements” that are needed for the system to work? 

References
"Inquisition" Berean Beacon. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbBBezxalXU&hd=1
Orwell, George. 1984. Ed. Erich Fromm. New York: Harcourt, 1949.
"The Pit and the Pendulum" Edgar Allen Poe. (1996, November 14).In ibiblio.org. Retrieved 17:10, November 20, 2014, from: http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Poe/Pit_Pendulum.pdf