The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel, published in 1838.

The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym who stows away aboard a whaling ship called Grampus. Various adventures and mis-adventures befall Pym including shipwreck, mutiny and cannibalism. The story starts out as a fairly conventional adventure at sea, but it becomes increasingly strange and hard to classify in later chapters, involving religious symbolism and the Hollow Earth.

Poe wrote the novel with a deliberate and experimental structure whereby the mood of each chapter was matched by the corresponding chapter at the other end of the book. This results in the narrative starting optimistic, descending into depression and then returning to optimism.

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Influence

In 1897 French author Jules Verne published The Sphinx of the Ice Fields. A sequel to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the short novel explores the adventures of the Halbrane as its crew search for answers to what became of Pym. Translations of this text are sometimes titled An Antarctic Mystery or The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Poe's novel was also an influence on H. P. Lovecraft, whose 1936 story At the Mountains of Madness follows similar thematic direction and borrows the cry tekeli-li from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Yann Martel named a character in his Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi after Poe's fictional Richard Parker, and other real life Richard Parkers who were all coincidently involved with cannibalism, ship wrecks and having the same name (see below). As Yann Martel said "So many Richard Parkers had to mean something." [1]

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Coincidence

An interesting note about this book is the part concerning cannibalism. In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, there is a shipwreck in which 4 survivors are left clinging to the hull. Rather than die of starvation, they draw lots to see which one would get eaten. The loser is a man named Richard Parker. In 1884, years after the book's publishing, a yacht named the Mignonette was making a trip from England to Australia. On its way, the boat sank and the 4 survivors became stranded in a dinghy. After 16 days, Captain Dudley and his 2 mates killed and ate the cabin boy - coincidentally a young man named Richard Parker. On return to England, the 3 men were charged with murder. The lawbooks were officially changed so that murder was only acceptable under self-defense and the men were found guilty. Then another Richard Parker died when his ship, named the Francis Spaight, sunk in 1846. Although not himself eaten, some of the survivors of that wreck were involved in cannibalism.

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