Edgar Allan Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym: An Antarctic Odyssey of Terror

Literary Composition and Context. Edgar Allan Poe composed his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, as an apparently "unfinished" story in 25 chapters and a "Note," using an experimental style in which early events find a parallel in later chapters of the narrative. A strangely eclectic tale, the story involves a seagoing narrator who travels on two major vessels, the American brig Grampus and another ship, the Jane, the latter of which makes its way into the Antarctic. In each case, atrocities and butcheries occur, and Pym claims that "it appears to me a thousand wonders I am alive to-day."

What begins as a fairly conventional sea adventure, in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, evolves into a gothic odyssey rife with allusions to Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the book of Revelation, and apocalyptic visions of the hollow earth, concluding with the appearance of "a shrouded white human figure" who might represent death or some metaphysical entity. Poe actually involves himself in the tale, because Pym purportedly trusted Poe with the incomplete manuscript. It seems Mr. Poe "expressed interest in my statement . . . which related to the Antarctic Ocean."

The Voyage of the Grampus and Descent into Horror. Pym early expresses his "greatest desire to go to sea." A stowaway aboard the brig Grampus, Pym admits possessing a fecund imagination, one that predicts the future course of his experience aboard the Jane: "My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown."

As Daniel Defoe's classic narrative of sea travel Robinson Crusoe, Poe's narrative includes aspects of providential design, of ill-fated "conceptions," "labors," and thwarted "deliverances" that suggest unnatural gestations and births, often "miscarriages" of human justice. Pym will explore "events . . . of the most unconsidered and unconceivable character." At one point, in chapter 10, when Pym and his few surviving shipmates are in dire straits at sea, seeking rescue, they spy "a large hermaphrodite brig, of a Dutch build." They note "three seamen, whom by their dress we took to be Hollanders." At first, their hopes embrace the vision of rescue joyfully: "our hearts leaped up wildly . . . shouts and thanksgiving to God for the deliverance." But, typically of the pattern of the novel, the scene quickly degenerates into a gothic nightmare, as the survivors have inadvertently caught a glimpse of the famous haunted ship The Flying Dutchman: "a smell, a stench . . . hellish—utterly suffocating—insufferable, inconceivable . . . triple horror of that spectacle." We palpably saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel." The "pilot" of the dead ship turns out to be a seagull "fasting on a corpse" standing at the wheel, a grotesque vision of nature's unholy stewardship.

In chapter 11, the survivors of the mutiny aboard the Grampus themselves devolve, by dint of hunger and privation, to cannibal measures in order to endure. They embrace a kind of "madness . . . the sad reverse of our prospects . . . Parker . . . proposed . . . that one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others." Pym himself will succumb, in chapter 24, to an explicit death wish, a spiritual collapse engendered by his own imaginative faculties, his own unnammed guilt, compounded by any number of appearances in the Antarctic of Coleridge's fateful albatross, his bird of irredeemable guilt: "the vast depths yet to be descended . . . I found these fancies [of our destruction] creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact. . . . My whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. . . . I felt a new being. . . . We now found ourselves not far from the ravine . . . those dreary regions marking the site of degraded Babylon."

Premature Burial and Psychological Terror. One of Poe's favorite vehicles for horrific effect, the idea of premature burial, occurs twice in the novel. The first occurrence involves Pym's abandonment to a cargo hold aboard the Grampus, on which he has secretly stowed away. His sealing in without adequate food and water finds its parallel in chapter 21, when the indigenous population has engineered a massive cave-in on the European sailors, and Poe and his mate Peters are entombed in a collapsed earthen fissure. Poe then has Pym expound the bodily and psychic terror of death in life: "We were consequently lost for ever, being thus entombed alive. . . . I firmly believed that no incident ever occurring in the course of human events is better adapted to inspire the supremeness of mental and bodily distress than a case like our own, of living inhumation. The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, unite with the ghastly considerations that we are beyond the remotest confines of hope, and that such is the allotted portion of the dead. To carry into the human heart a degree of appalling awe and horror not to be tolerated—never to be conceived."

A combination of Homer's Odyssey and Dante's journey to Inferno, Poe's narrative embraces human extremes, as in his description of the race of black wild men led by Too-Wit, determined to ingratiate themselves with the European explorers only to annihilate them. "The savages . . . appeared to be the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the earth." The sufferings exacted by Pym's journey might be the tragic price for the sin of intellectual pride, that same scientific curiosity condemned, respectively by Goethe and Shelley in Faust and Prometheus Unbound, their romantic critiques of overweening scientific investigation:

- "I warmly pressed upon [Captain Guy] the expediency of persevering, at least for a few days longer, in the direction we were now holding. So tempting an opportunity of solving the great problem, in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded to man. . . . While I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of satisfaction at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of those most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention."

The Enchanted Ocean and Ambiguous Conclusion. The cause of science justifies the nightmares it exacts on human souls. Pym will speak (in chapter 28) of "that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled." These same "miracles" will prove as perfidious as they are blessed: Poe has become ambivalent on the topic of nature. The natives of Antarctica would warrant another sort of superlative, as "among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe," who will reap "the full and perfect fruits of their treachery." Whether Pym's final account of March 21–22, his having traveled into the heated waters of the Antarctic Ocean, "the enkindled ocean," represents transcendence or damnation remains a matter for literary speculation. If The Flying Dutchman vessel is "hermaphroditic," so too is Mother Nature's sickly womb, "warm" and "milky white," and lorded over by a menacing, male figure who appears to beckon Pym to oblivion.

Critical Analysis and Discussion Prompts. The following questions are provided for discussion or writing.
1. Compare Poe's account to another piece of fantastic literature that imagines a voyage into unexplored territory, such as At the Mountains of Madness, the work of Poe's literary successor, H. P. Lovecraft. How does each author depict the most desolate of Earth's unexplored continents? What larger themes does each develop by means of these depictions?

2. Examine Poe's depiction of "native" behavior. Is he possibly being sarcastic and ironic in his vision, perhaps writing an allegorical work after Swift's Gulliver's Travels?