The Pit and the Pendulum

The end of “The Pit and the Pendulum” is one of the most famous moments of deus ex machina in literature. Deus ex machina, Latin for “God from/outside the machine,” describes an unprecedented intervention that salvages a hopeless situation at the last minute—as if a deity has swooped in to fix everything all of a sudden. Here, the speaker is literally on the verge of the pit when “an outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies” (256).

Often, a deus ex machina feels a little too convenient, a little deflating—which is the case in this story. The narrator has ratcheted up the tension unbearably, and then all at once, at the last possible second, it’s all over. The flaming walls even “rush” back. And who can believe that the commander of the French forces himself just so happens to come save this one guy in this deeply-buried dungeon?

The sheer heavy-handedness of this deus ex machina asks us to see this story in rather less literal terms. The arrival of the general might be read, for instance, as an awakening after sleep: the stern, orderly, regimented “General” of consciousness chases away all the nightmarish, half-formed horrors of the speaker’s “imprisonment” in dread and dream.