The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Edgar Allan Poe - Dennis Pahl (essay date 1987)
Dennis Pahl (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “Poe/Script: The Death of the Author in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in New Orleans Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1987, pp. 51-60.
[In the following essay, Pahl explores Poe's questioning of the idea of selfhood in Pym, as evidenced in his handling of the narrator.]
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is a text riddled with mysteries, not the least of which involves Pym's seeming annihilation at the story's end:
And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us [Pym and Dirk Peters]. 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 figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.1
Most of the commentary on this passage centers exclusively on the meaning of the “shrouded human...
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