"The Pit and the Pendulum" is similar, both in its technique and its central dilemma, to other Poe stories. For example, Poe often used the concept of a premature burial as the basic predicament of a story. In many ways, the narrator in "The Pit and the Pendulum" also suffers the horror of being made to languish in his gravelike pit.

The manner in which the narrator methodically examines the nature of his cell and attempts to deduce ways he might escape is another characteristic of Poe's fiction. In this regard, the story is not only typical of Poe's nightmare stories, it also shares some of the logical elements of stories such as "The Gold-Bug" (1843) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844).

"The Pit and the Pendulum" is also typical of other Poe stories that present horrifying and extreme predicaments.

In "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (1841) the predicament is...