How does "The Pit and the Pedulam" reflect Poe's Life?

-- Anonymous, December 05, 2001

Answers

Because Poe was captured and tortured by the Spanish Inquisition? Perhaps he had a morbid fear of being cut in two by a large scythe?

Why is everyone so concerned with what Poe might or might not have done? Why don't people try and understand his work as pieces of fiction?

-- Anonymous, December 06, 2001

The textbook questions of every teacher should be thrown out! Stock questions are tiresome and mind numbing so much so as to distract you from the fact they are often offtrack or trivial.

The tales might reflect the workings of Poe's mind(the same as for any writer, but this eseems the endless quest to find the ghoulish Poe wedded to his horror stories. So am I to my tax forms.

A suspicion, unable to be proved, might arise that the Pit is an expression Poe's own desperate battles to live his life against mounting fears and troubles, to conquer his despair and confusion with reason and remain defiant and battling to the end. And a sane, free man with choice. The easy ending would seem to show that any deus ex machina seems anticlimax to this Promethean struggle. Poe is a man of the trap, as are we all, as long as we are alive moving in the dangers and losses of a darkening twilight boundary between life and death. But short of discussing this with Poe we can simply enjoy the resonances between the man's soul and his body of work.

-- Anonymous, December 07, 2001