An analysis,

It’s not often I find something like this; specifically, a book I hadn’t heard of by an author I love. the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only fully completed novel by Edgar Allen Poe, someone I learned to do voicework by narrating. I’ve literally read, cover to cover, multiple compendiums but somehow this story slipped past me. It was only because of House of Usher on Netflix that I had heard of it and because I felt deeply compelled to figure out Mark Hamill’s character (who was my favorite).

The Pym story is odd for Poe because it doesn’t follow his normal tropes. I could probably make a key for Poe: dead wife, remarried; main character with high sensory perception, etc cetera. But the Pym story is a high seas novel in the vein of Treasure Island.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t surreal. It does have the trope of a man trapped in a confined space which he details, similar to Pit and the Pendulum, in the chapters in which Pym is a stowaway on a vessel then overtaken in a mutiny with no one aware he’s below deck. And there is, of course, the novel’s abrupt end which plays out a bit like M. Valdemar where the whole  narrative could Be taken for a hoax—the Pym narrative claims to only be transcribed by Poe.

No, what’s surreal and out of pocket for Poe about it is how he plays a straight face for most of the novel. Only toward the very end is there any supernatural happening, instead, much of the book could have been written by someone else.

It seems almost like a writing exercise.  Published in 1838, the Pym narrative covers shipwrecks, mutiny, cannibalism, hollow earth theory, and touches on the race for the poles– infamously leading to the deaths of many explorers. It seems to have been an obvious inspiration for The Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne fifty years later.