Question

Read the selection below from the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe and answer the

question that follows.
I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which
had escaped. Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no more and the death just avoided was of that
very character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting 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.
I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my
own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me.
How does Poe portray the madness of the narrator in the passage above?

Answer 1

b

Step-by-step explanation:

Answer 2

Step-by-step explanation:

Pretend that you've never read the whole story of the Pit and the Pendulum and read the passage you've given us. What's the subject? Can you make it out?

You think it is about the death he avoided.

But the scene shifts to the consequences of the fall and the world would not have seen him.

Then he shifts again to the fabulous and frivolous tales of the inquisition. What has that to do with nearly falling to your doom?

Now he again shifts to the kind of torture that awaits him.

So the prose, though quite beautiful, is unconnected as though his mind can't focus on a single thought for not even a sentence. Have you met such people? Don't you question their state of mind.