Analysis of ‘pitandpendulum’

Pit and Pendulum analysis:

The third password that we receive in Skeleton Creek happens to be another reference to a written piece by Edgar Allen Poe.  I’m beginning to see a trend.  But why try to fix something that isn’t broken?  Using these references to Poe’s pieces has given incredible insight into the characters and nuances within the story that are otherwise lost.  Perhaps the same effect can be achieved through other references, but for now it seems as though the sad, somber, and significantly psychotic parables of E.A. Poe add a great deal to the Skeleton Creek story.

As with the last few analyses of Poe’s passwords, it is key to spend time studying the story in order to understand why it is embedded within Skeleton Creek.  The more we know, the more we can learn.  “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the story of a prisoner sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition.  After receiving his death penalty, the narrator loses consciousness, but soon awakens in a shapeless, darkened room.  Under the impression that most prisoners are given public hangings, the narrator is confused as to why his punishment would be any different.  After considering the possibilities and finding his bearings, he realizes that he’s in a dungeon at Toledo, one of the notorious Inquisition prisons.   Between his spells of unconsciousness, through exploration our narrator discovers a pit of indeterminable depth in the center of the cell.

The narrator wakes once more to find himself strapped to a board, looking up at a scythe that is moving back and forth across his body in a pendulous motion.  He realizes that the blade is only getting closer and in an act of desperation, lures the dungeon-dwelling rats to chew through his binds.  The situation only grows more ominous as the walls heat up and begin to enclose.  However, at the last possible moment the walls cease their movement and the narrator is grabbed by a mysterious arm, saving his life from the certain-death that awaited him in the pit.  The French army had taken control of the prison at Toledo, saving this man’s life at the last possible instant.

Exactly how historically accurate this story is, remains up for debate. Just the same, the story lends itself to some pretty powerful commentary within the context of Skeleton Creek.  The first question that comes to mind is, why now?  What makes the reference relevant within this part of the story?  I believe the answer to that question is hidden aurally.  A great deal of the descriptions given within the story relies on auditory (aural) stimulus.  The same thing can be said for the Sarah’s ‘pitandpendulum’ video.  As she talks to Ryan, Sarah is analyzing the audio from the dredge.  She has him focus on the sounds of Joe Bush’s leg dragging across the wooden floor and the noises she heard while standing outside the dredge.  She questions her own ears saying, “maybe I’m hearing something that isn’t even there.”  The most important thing to take away from all this being, all information can be twisted and distorted.  Even trusting something as basic as your own senses; touch, sound, sight, can you have you relying on false facts.  Never accept anything at face value because even in the best circumstances your own instincts can be the culprit playing tricks on you.

This piece also seems to be achieving relevant commentary on Ryan’s accident within the dredge.  The similarities between the narrator and Ryan are unmistakable.  The narrator in Poe’s story is tortured through fear knowing that the entire time he’s being held captive, his captors are watching.  Ryan’s situation is remarkably similar, as he feels like a captive in his own home unable to see Sarah, his parents constantly watching him.  The possibility exists that instead of Ryan’s parents being the equivalent of the captors, it is instead the ghost of Joe Bush that is watching Ryan, torturing him and holding him captive with fright.

Continuing down the same path of questioning, whose arm is it that extends to the narrator of Poe’s story?  We can imagine the arm reaching out at the last second, a nameless and faceless savior.  Is Sarah also reaching out to Ryan, trying to help him from falling deeper into his own cavernous pit of paranoia and fear?  Or perhaps in Ryan’s case, the arm that extends is not there to pull him back up to safety, but instead belongs to the ghost who has pushed him over the railing.

This password provides less in the way of foreshadow than it does in passive commentary on what is happening with Ryan and Sarah and this moment.  It is clear that looking into Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” allows us to look further into Skeleton Creek at the same time.  The similarities are there and it doesn’t take a keen eye to spot them, just an inquisitive nature.

Questions still linger as to what the relationship between Sarah and Ryan is like from their respective perspectives.  Is Sarah compassionate at all to Ryan’s fears and anxieties, or does she enjoy the ability to take advantage of those qualities and manipulate him as her own personal marionette?  Does Ryan believe in any of this or is he embellishing the story to add realism to his perceived sense of fear?  Could it be possible that what we are reading is in fact not Ryan’s journal at all, but a fictional story that he’s fabricated?  He is a writer after all, living as a teenager in a small town.  What do we have that proves it isn’t all based on something that a bored teenager thought up and put on paper?  These are exactly the kinds of questions that these intricate literary references should cause you to ask.

Analysis of ‘houseofusher’

Analysis of “houseofusher” password-

One thing that I immediately noticed about the passwords that appear throughout Skeleton Creek and Ghost in the Machine is that the majority of them are literary and film references.  To really get a feel for why these passwords were chosen, I have to go directly to the source.   Directly to the source, in this case, means I’m going directly to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

I’m a big believer in the idea that not very many things just happen without a reason, without a motive, without logical rationale.  Things are placed in a particular spot for a specific reason, they don’t just end up there.  I’m also a big believer in the question, ‘why?’  No other word holds as much inquisitive power, and the answers to that question are always the most important of answers.  All evangelism of practicality aside, these are the questions that must be answered.  Why reference Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” piece, and why now?

When doing my own research on “House of Usher” I found that this piece is considered the best example of Poe’s “totality” where every element and detail is related and relevant.  This is a perfect example of what I was referencing earlier, that everything is in its place, and its place was chosen for a reason.  There are no accidents in Poe’s stories, just as I believe that using this “houseofusher” reference was no accident.

You cannot possibly accomplish much in the way of analysis without reading the piece itself.  As it begins, the narrator receives a letter from his friend, Roderick Usher, asking him to visit and stay in his house for an extended period of time.  I’m immediately reminded of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and can’t help but feel like the narrator has been invited into a trap from the very beginning, sans shrieking werewolves.  When he arrives, he finds Usher to be a sick man suffering from what appears to be severe anxiety and hypochondria.  In other words, he has scared himself half to death.  The reader is soon introduced to Usher’s twin sister, Madeline, who has also fallen victim to this strange sickness.  Usher reveals that he believes the house to be the cause of the sickness, and that the building and its surroundings are haunted.

Roderick Usher later notifies the narrator that his sister, Madeline, has passed.  He then decides it best to entomb her body for two weeks before she is given a proper burial.  The next two weeks prove to be difficult for Roderick and the narrator as they feel a haunting presence in the house that grows.  Then one violently stormy evening while the narrator reads “The Mad Trist” to Roderick, a shriek is heard in congruence to the shriek in the story.  Roderick believes the shriek and subsequent noises are being made by his entombed sister.  After swinging open the door to the vault in which she was placed, her body (bloodied from what appears to be a physical struggle to escape the vault) falls upon Roderick in his moment of anagnorisis, killing him of fright.  As the narrator flees the house, he looks back to see the structure split in two, collapsing and sinking into the tarn (lake).

So back to the question, ‘why?’  I believe the story is closely tied to our characters Ryan and Sarah, as well as the dredge.  While reading and re-reading, I have found the house belonging to Usher a strong metaphor for Skeleton Creek’s dredge.   The way Poe describes the house makes it out to be this place, forgotten, but not yet destroyed.  All the pieces are there, though with fungi growing on the walls and weeds overgrown, it is obvious the place doesn’t get many visitors.  The fact that it has this aura of para-normality brings it even closer to the dredge, both giving the sense that they have been abandoned by the living, but not by the dead.  Poe describes the house surrounded by “a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.”  Strangely enough, I couldn’t come up with better words to describe our deserted piece of swamp-machinery in Skeleton Creek, Oregon.

The connections run deeper.  Poe writes, “Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream…” while Skeleton Creek begins with Ryan also awaking from his dreams.  The similarities are many, perhaps the strongest being the idea of entombment.  Madeline spends weeks entombed in a vault within the same house that her brother lives in, struggling to the moment of her death trying to escape.  When she does, she and her brother both sink into the surrounding swampy tarn, as if swallowed whole.  The same has happened to Joe Bush; swallowed whole by the swampy surrounding waters, pulled under, and entombed there.

Each time I ask a question about the relevance of something within the story of Skeleton Creek it only seems to spark another question or lead to a different train of thought.  Reading “The Fall of the House of Usher” made me question the importance of the password itself, but now I’m beginning to question the characters.  Is Ryan just a different form of Roderick, victim to a deep level of paranoia, so intensely schizophrenic that most of us couldn’t begin to understand?  Roderick shows us his true colors and cruel intentions when his sister Madeline is released from the vault.  He was a crazed, sick man who lied and buried his sister alive.  Are we to assume that Ryan is capable of the same psychosomatically perverse deeds that Roderick has shown?  These questions only seem to lead to more questions.  Is Ryan capable of telling the truth?  What is this journal to him?  To most, a journal is a mirror, reflecting the author’s thoughts verbatim, in perfection translation from mind to pen to paper.  However, a journal belonging to a person capable of murder and deceit would just as easily be able to lie to one’s self, the journal reflecting only superficial thoughts, reflecting only the things that someone would want others to see in them.  I think Ted Bundy would agree with me on this one.

At some point, you have to question Ryan’s motivation and his ability to even tell the truth.  As the reader, you are tempted to believe Ryan and believe in Ryan because he is narrating, but be careful not to let that lead you into some false pretense.  At this point, we really know very little about him and what makes him tick and I think that is what ‘houseofusher’ warns us about.

It seems to me that the mention of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is more than a random literary reference picked out by the author, but is instead an intense foreshadowing of what is to come.  From this password alone we are able to infer so much about the possibilities within the story and the characters.  Confused?  Good, you should be.  Someone obviously put a lot of thought into all this to confuse you, for you to ask the kinds of questions that make you uncomfortable.  We’ll see if that is the case with any of the other passwords, but I can confidently say that these references add an entire additional layer to Skeleton Creek’s story.