In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death”, the author uses different symbolism to illustrate the image of death. In both of these stories, death is the final result of a punishment, the end of a human’s life. However, in the first story, Poe shows us that there exists something in human ‘s life that is more terrible than death. And in the second story, Poe tells us that death is inevitable and it is useless if you try to escape it. From the beginning of “The Pit and the Pendulum”, Poe starts to show us the desperation and the terror the narrator