Ready Reference Treatise: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

By Raja Sharma

“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1838. It happens to be the author’s only complete novel.

The story revolves around the young titular character Arthur Gordon Pym. He goes and boards a whaling ship called the Grampus. He goes through several adventures and misadventures, including shipwreck, cannibalism, and mutiny.

Eventually, Pym is rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy. When he is on the rescue ship, Pym meets a sailor named Dirk Peters. They continue their adventures together further south.

When they reach the land, they have to face hostile black-skinned natives. Eventually, they escape back to the ocean. The novel has an abrupt ending. However, Pym and Peters resume their journey towards the South Pole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Jan 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310847011

Raja Sharma

Raja Sharma is a retired college lecturer.He has taught English Literature to University students for more than two decades.His students are scattered all over the world, and it is noticeable that he is in contact with more than ninety thousand of his students.

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Ready Reference Treatise: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

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Ready Reference Treatise: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Raja Sharma

Copyright@2015 Raja Sharma

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Chapter One: Introduction

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe was first published in 1838. It happens to be the author’s only complete novel.

The story revolves around the young titular character Arthur Gordon Pym. He goes and boards a whaling ship called the Grampus. He goes through several adventures and misadventures, including shipwreck, cannibalism, and mutiny.

Eventually, Pym is rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy. When he is on the rescue ship, Pym meets a sailor named Dirk Peters. They continue their adventures together further south.

When they reach the land, they have to face hostile black-skinned natives. Eventually, they escape back to the ocean. The novel has an abrupt ending. However, Pym and Peters resume their journey towards the South Pole.

At the beginning of the novel, it seems that we are going to read a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but as the novel progresses, the story becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify.

It is said that Edgar Allan Poe had intended to write a realistic story. He had the experiences of several real life sea voyages.

The present novel heavily draws from Jeremiah N. Reynolds. The Hollow Earth theory has also been referred to. The author’s own experiences at sea also inspired him while writing the present novel.

It is often concluded that the novel has several autobiographical elements and several hints of racism.

Edgar Allan Poe had faced several failures in the field of short story writing, and his career was not advancing as a short-story writer, therefore, he decided to write a longer work.

Some chapters of the novel were published as serialized installments in the Southern Literary Messenger, but it was never completed.

Eventually, the full novel was published in the month of July in 1838, in two volumes. Some of the contemporary critics presented negatives remarks by calling it a too gruesome novel. They pointed that the novel relied heavily on several other works of the other writers. However, there were several other critics and reviewers who admired the novel and called it quite exciting.

It is noticeable that later in his life, Edgar Allan Poe himself called the present novel ‘a very silly book.’ For all that, the novel became an influential work.

The world famous novelists such as Herman Melville and Julies Verne were highly influenced by The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

The novel is generally viewed differently by the modern critics, and they have been a bit more forgiving. They definitely do not view this book as a masterpiece and one of the best works of the author, but they take it as a fascinating component of his body of works. They say that the novel can be interpreted in several different ways.

D. H. Lawrence once said, Edgar Allan Poe was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human souls. He sounded horror and the warning of his own doom.

Some other critics of the time had their own interpretations of the novel. Most of the reviewers and critics agree that Edgar Allan Poe is a much better short-story writer than a novelist.

Chapter Two: Plot