"It's not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see." The narrator thought he was dead when he woke up inside of a pit. He was sentenced to death, brought upon by the actions of human torture. The Pit, a symbol of hell; is what he went through in a struggle for his life. Edgar Allan Poe presented the narrator as clever and courageous when he survived several forms of death, but experienced horrific abuse.

The man's terror began when he woke up in complete darkness to nearly falling into a well. Horrible thoughts raged through his mind as to were he was. In an attempt to figure his prison's shape he fell, "My chin rested upon the floor of the prison, but my lips and upper portion of my head touched nothing." almost in to a...