All four of these themes are present to some
degree in 's short story "," but only the third (C), can be described as a major
theme
of the text. The narrator tells us in the first paragraph that he has
survived the horrors of
the Inquisition, since he describes the lips of the
judges as "whiter than the sheet upon
which I trace these words," which is to
say that he is writing about the incident at a
later date.
The story consists of a series of incidents which could easily
have
proved fatal. The fear of death and nothingness and the suffering caused by
religious
intolerance are a constant background, but the theme of the story
is always the narrator's
survival in increasingly unlikely circumstances.
Only the accident of his stumbling prevents him
falling into the pit, but he
has to exercise real ingenuity to use a gothic detail of his
imprisonmentthe
rats with which his cell is infestedto escape the pendulum. The prolonged
description of his fall in the penultimate paragraph even suggests that he resists just
long
enough to be rescued by General Lasalle. At every point in the story
there is terror, but its
immediate causethe seemingly insuperable obstacleis
always surmounted.
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