In the short story, The Pit and The Pendulum, the author, Edgar Allen Poe, uses the character General Lasalle and the jury of the Spanish Inquisition to argue the good and the evil that many people posse. Like the narrator, the jury remains nameless and faceless throughout the short story. The jury is only expressed through their torture tactics. During this time period, a jury was needed in order to sentence someone to death. However, these judges are different in that they are actually slowly torturing the narrator instead of burning him at the stake or hanging him in front of the public eye “Yet, for a while, I saw, but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white – whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words –…show more content… The General saves the narrator at the end of the story. Lasalle appears right when the narrator has accepted the fact that he was going to die and gave up hope. Lasalle bursts through the cell and pulls the narrator off the edge of the pit. “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. “ Without Lasalle, the narrator would have fallen to his demise and the story never would have ever been told.
Antoine Charles Louis de Lasalle, General Lasalle, was an actual general during the Spanish Inquisition. Lasalle was part of the French Cavalry during the Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. He was loved and adored by those under his command. He was killed in battle at the end of the war in Wagram, Austria on July 6, 1809. Lasalle played a major role in the destruction of the Spanish Inquisitions. Poe used an actual general at the end of the story to make the setting more
