Intro
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only novel by Edgar Allan Poe. It tells the story of—surprise—Arthur Gordon Pym, who boards a whaling ship, where he gets into all kinds of trouble. There's a mutiny. There's a shipwreck. There are scary 'natives.'
In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison says that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this novel, especially in relation to blackness and whiteness. Let's zoom in on a passage from the novel that Morrison analyzes in her book. The passage, which is written in diary form, comes right at the end of the book, when Nu-Nu, a 'native' who has been taken prisoner by Arthur Gordon Pym, dies.
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- 1837 THE NARRATIVE OF ARTHUR GORDON PYM OF NANTUCKET Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-49) - American poet, short-story writer, and critic who is best known for his tales of ratiocination, his fantastical horror stories, and his genre-founding detective stories.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket Comprising the details of a mutiny and atrocious butchery on board the American brig Grampus, on her way to the South Seas, in the month of June, 1827.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. The Preface was published in 1838. A strictly chronological reading of Pym as it was published, then, would proceed in the order: Episode 1, Episode 2, Preface, Episode 1, etc. A strictly chronological reading of.
Quote
March 21st.—A sullen darkness now hovered above us—but from out the milky depths of the ocean a luminous glare arose, and stole up along the bulwarks of the boat. We were nearly overwhelmed by the white ashy shower which settled upon us and upon the canoe, but melted into the water as it fell …
March 22nd.—The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
Analysis
At first glance, this passage seems to be just a bunch of landscape description. There's an ocean. There are birds. There's a cataract. It's all a little bit eerie, and cold.
But Morrison tells us to look at all the references to light and dark, black and white here. The 'sullen darkness' of the air is contrasted with the ocean's 'milky depths.' There's a 'white ashy shower,' and a 'white curtain' before the boat. The birds are 'white.' And then there's this weird 'shrouded' figure that appears at the end, whose skin is 'of the perfect whiteness of the snow.'
So what does all this have to do with Ethnic Studies? Well, Morrison points out that the white figure at the end of the novel appears only after the death of Nu-Nu, the black 'native' who is taken prisoner by Pym toward the end of the book ('upon touching [Nu-Nu], we found his spirit departed').
According to Morrison, this suggests that there's some serious subliminal stuff going on with ethnicity here. The impenetrable, powerful white figure appears only after the black figure Nu-Nu is destroyed. Morrison thinks there may be a fantasy of white mastery and dominance at play here. Poe, consciously or unconsciously, seems to be asserting the power of whiteness (and white people) over the impotence of blackness (and black people).
But it's not quite that simple, because the imagery also suggests some insecurity or fear. If the white figure (and white people) are so much more powerful than Nu-Nu (and black people), why does Poe have to go out of his way to give us this way over-the-top image of the white shrouded figure? He's trying so hard to establish the power of this white figure that we end up questioning whether it's that powerful at all.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel. Fitter trade practical tools pdf online. It was published in two installments in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger but was not completed due to Poe’s firing from the magazine. The full novel was published in July 1838 (without Poe’s name, as it purported to be Pym’s actual narrative) with a subtitle of:
Comprising the Details of Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827. With an Account of the Recapture of the Vessel by the Survivors; Their Shipwreck and Subsequent Horrible Sufferings from Famine; Their Deliverance by Means of the British Schooner Jane Guy; the Brief Cruise of this Latter Vessel in the Atlantic Ocean; Her Capture, and the Massacre of Her Crew Among a Group of Islands in the Eighty-Fourth Parallel of Southern Latitude; Together with the Incredible Adventures and Discoveries Still Farther South to Which That Distressing Calamity Gave Rise.
Long considered a “problem” text in Poe’s oeuvre, the story starts out in a conventional first-person narrative of an exploration at sea but then descends into mutiny, cannibalism, savagery, and overwhelming ambiguity. It was not received well by contemporary critics but has since been recognized for its influence on writers like Melville, Baudelaire, and Verne; its interesting relationship to some of Poe’s famous short stories; and its fascinating psychological, mythological, and religious themes.
In 1836 the publisher Harper’s counseled Poe to write a novel rather than a short story, telling him the American reading public preferred works of fiction with a single and connected story. Poe took this advice but the resulting work – Pym – is a strange tale that seems to have two unrelated sections, many irrelevant sections and several digressions, plot inconsistencies, and conspicuous borrowing from other source materials.
Pym has many different influences. While there were no examples of fictionalized sea voyages for Poe to draw from, there were certainly multiple real-life accounts of such travels; sea exploration was a popular literary genre at the time. Poe used both Benjamin Morrell’s Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and Pacific, 1822-1831 (1832) and Jeremiah Reynolds’s Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas (1836); he had reviewed the latter favorably. Poe had also traveled by ship when he was young, once undertaking a voyage lasting 34 days. He was also influenced by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The chasms opening up in the sea at the end of the novel were inspired by the popular Hollow Earth theory of Poe’s day.
The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Pdf
In terms of popular reception, Poe’s readers were impressed by the book – particularly in the description of exploration and life at sea – as well as frustrated by it. The tone shifts from a pragmatic, measured first-person account to melodrama and histrionics as the narrative proceeds; the structure of the novel perplexed its contemporary readers, and the end was mostly just obnoxious. In his introduction to the novel, Jeremy Meyers writes that Poe’s choice of the incomplete journal form “allows Poe to disguise and excuse his own inability to control the plot and complete the novel.” Poe himself seemed annoyed by his work and called it a “very silly book.” Contemporary reviewers found it full of impossibilities, and disliked its macabre and disgusting details and its narrative license. Lewis Gaylord Clark wrote that it was told in a “loose and slip-shod manner” and another said, “there are too many atrocities, too many strange horrors, and finally, there is no conclusion to it.”
Edgar Allan Poe The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon
Modern critics have been a bit more forgiving, viewing Pym not as a masterpiece and certainly not as one of Poe’s greatest works (with the notable exception of Jorge Louis Borges), but as a fascinating component of his body of work and rife with possible interpretations. His overarching themes and their resonance with readers are noted by D.H. Lawrence: “[Poe] was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded horror and the warning of his own doom.”