In "The Pit and the Pendulum," how does Edgar Allan Poe develop both the first person point of view and the narrative mode? "The Pit and the...

's superb
short story "" has long been subject to many existential and Freudian
interpretations.  In the vacillation of the first-person unreliable narrator who is
hallucinatory at times and rational in others, there are shifts between the subconscious and the
conscious mind.  Thus, the narrative mode is one of psychic reflections and few
realities:

Amid frequent and thoughful endeavors to
remember, amid earnest struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into
which my sould then lapsed, there have been brief, very brief periods when I conjured up
remembrances which my lucid reason assures me could refer only to that condition of seeming
unconsciousness.

The narrator's variable level of
consciouness directs the narrative as his perception of things such as the candles and the
dimensions of the cell differ depending upon his mental state. The "shadows of memory"
recall motion and sound while his subconscious senses the "horror at my heart" and
a "rushing revival of soul and a successful effort to move" as his conscious mind
has

a full memory of the trial, of the judges, of the
sable draperies, of the sentence, of the sickness of the swoon.

It is important to keep in mind that the narrator tells his experiences in retrospect. 
And it is this retelling by the "sick unto death with that long agony" narrator that
contributes to the horror of the tale.  The hallucinatory quality of the narration also
contributes to the Gothic effect of Poe's tale of transcendent experience.