The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds …
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus. Various adventures and misadventures befall Pym, including shipwreck, mutiny, and cannibalism, before he is saved by the crew of the Jane Guy. Aboard this vessel, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters continue their adventures farther south. Docking on land, they encounter hostile black-skinned natives before escaping back to the ocean. The novel ends abruptly as Pym and Peters continue toward the South Pole.
The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify. Poe, who intended to present a realistic story, was inspired by several real-life accounts of sea voyages, and drew heavily from Jeremiah N. Reynolds and referenced the Hollow Earth theory. He also drew from his own experiences at sea. Analyses of the novel often focus on possible autobiographical elements as well as its portrayal of race and the symbolism in the final lines of the work.
Difficulty in finding literary success early in his short story-writing career inspired Poe to pursue writing a longer work. A few serialized installments of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket were first published in the Southern Literary Messenger, though never completed. The full novel was published in July 1838 in two volumes. Some critics responded negatively to the work for being too gruesome and for cribbing heavily from other works, while others praised its exciting adventures. Poe himself later called it "a very silly book". The novel later influenced Herman Melville and Jules Verne.
Pym is an adventure tale about a young man on a whaling ship--something you would associate more with Melville or Conrad than with Poe. While there are passages of gruesome crimes, people being buried alive, and--if you wait long enough for it--the fantastic, this mostly reads like an adaptation of Robinson Crusoe for young men. There appear to be nods to Crusoe throughout, from Pym's choice to go to sea against his family's wishes; to his ague that makes him lose a day or more; to the inclusion of a journal account in the midst of the regular narration. The fantasies of blowing up of "savages" is the worst element it shares with Crusoe. I would recommend only to someone looking to read all of Poe's oeuvre.
There is no danger of this ever becoming a favorite of mine. The basic travelogue format of the novel, does not resolve itself (there are several missing chapters according to Poe). The early sections of the tale lead us to a rather brutal, senseless mutiny, and cannibalism. The final section becomes a travelogue again ending in yet more senseless violence. Yep, this is not my cup of tea.
