The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, is Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel. It begins as a plausible first-person sea adventure and steadily moves into horror, geographical fantasy, and unresolved mystery.

Drawn by his friend Augustus's stories of the ocean, the young Pym hides aboard the whaling ship Grampus. Mutiny, confinement in the hold, shipwreck, starvation, and cannibalism reduce the voyage to a sequence of increasingly extreme ordeals.

After Pym and the sailor Dirk Peters are rescued by the Jane Guy, they sail farther south into unknown waters. The island of Tsalal, its inhabitants, and its strange natural signs break the conventions of realistic travel narrative before the book ends abruptly on the approach to the Antarctic.

Poe combines nautical detail with claustrophobic terror and images that resist a single explanation. The unfinished-looking conclusion has made the novel's silences and contradictions as influential as its adventures.

"My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice. He was fortunate in everything, and had speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New Bank, as it was formerly called."