Question

Read the selection below from the short story “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe and complete the statement that follows.

I saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I 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.



All of the following stylistic devices appear in the passage above except __________.

repetition of words
sensory imagery
complicated sentences
simile

Answer 1

All of the following stylistic devices appear in the passage above except simile.

Step-by-step explanation:

Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Pit and the Pendulum" is about an unnamed narrator left in a pit to die. The 'experience' inside the pit leads the narrator to accept sudden and quick death as compared to that of the fear of being 'pushed' into the pit by the pendulum.

In the given passage, the author uses all of the given stylistic devices of repetitive words, sensory imagery, and complicated sentences. But he did not use simile in the passage.

Similes are comparison words using "like" and "as". And we do not find any of the two within the given excerpt.

Thus, the correct answer is a simile.