SOURCE: “Poe's Providential Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1981, pp. 147-56.

[In the following essay, Fukuchi explores the idea of providence in Pym's thematic and structural design, noting that human actions in the narrative are “played out against [a] divine plan” that renders them ineffectual.]

The ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has been variously interpreted as a racist allegory, a journey into the depths of the unconscious, a psychological reversion to infancy through return to a maternal figure, a metaphysical journey revealing the meaninglessness, incoherence, or inscrutability of existence, and a spiritual quest for final knowledge or perfect unity.¹ The last is closest to the mark, I believe, especially in view of the theological significance at the conclusion of the narrative of the white figure, resembling the Ancient of Days in the Book of Daniel and Christ in the Book of Revelations. Readings suggesting that the figure is divine and that the antarctic journey moves toward a revelation, albeit an abortive one, often see the Tsalalian hieroglyphic chasms as a literal rendering of the religious trope that God has written his “signature” on the landscape and conditions of the Tsalalians.² Critics have overlooked, however, evidence that a providential design informs the narrative as a whole, that the events of the Tsalal section are part of an overall pattern of forces and seeming accidents that propel a Pym largely unaware of their interconnections toward an antarctic revelation. The human plots and counterplots in the narrative are played out against this divine plot, and their repeated collapse suggests the inadequacy of materialistic quests and reinforces the increasingly disinterested motives that Pym displays in his providential survival and return.

I

One foundation for such a reading involves Poe's use of Captain Benjamin Morrell's Narrative of Four Voyages. Poe, of course, borrowed extensively from this text,³ and Pym explicitly quotes Morrell's contentions that the sea is clear and the temperature of air and water milder toward the south pole in order that “the reader may have an opportunity of seeing how far they were borne out by … subsequent experience.”⁴ More significantly, Pym's journey as a whole can be seen in relation to Morrell's introductory remarks on the superstitions surrounding the mysteries of the pole:

Many enterprising navigators of the last and present centuries have made highly laudable, and some of them partially successful, attempts to penetrate the cloud of mystery which still hangs over the Antarctic Seas. But every one has stopped at a certain point, timidly shrinking from the farther prosecution of what they deemed an impracticable project. Some, it is said, have even been deterred by a superstitious notion that an attempt to reach the South Pole was a presumptuous intrusion on the awful confines of nature,—an unlawful and sacrilegious prying into the secrets of the great Creator; who, they contend, has guarded the “ends of the earth” with an impassable bulwark of indissoluble ice; on which is written, “Thus far, shalt thou come, but no farther; and here shall thy proud course be stayed.”⁵

Pym's narrative systematically inverts this perspective, for it presents ample if indirect evidence that penetration of the polar mysteries is a divinely ordained mission for which Pym is elected. Poe calls attention to such a possibility through the voice of his fictional editor, who contends that his notes on the ending “open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture” and “should be regarded, perhaps, in connection with some of the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative; although in no visible manner is this chain of connection complete” (p. 245). As the following will show, however, the chain of circumstances and events suggesting that Pym is purposively drawn toward an open pole is clear, if not fully described.

Pym's experience counters the belief that God guards the pole with a barrier of ice, on which is “written” a commandment forbidding polar exploration. During Pym and Peters' final canoe trip, “The weather could by no means be considered disagreeable. We had a prevailing and very gentle wind from the northward, a smooth sea, and continual daylight. No ice whatever was to be seen; nor did I ever see one particle of this after leaving the parallel of Bennett's Islet” (p. 238). Furthermore, the Jane Guy is drawn to the pole with increasing speed. Even before reaching Tsalal, Pym notes that the ship encountered pleasant weather and “had a steady but very gentle breeze always from some northern part of the compass” (p. 177), and that the crew “found a current setting southwardly at the rate of half a mile per hour” (p. 174). Two days later, they find “a current setting still southwardly, and at the rate of three-quarters of a mile per hour” (p. 175); yet another day and the rate of the current is “a mile an hour. This constant tendency to the southward, both in the wind and current, caused some degree of speculation, and even of alarm, in different quarters of the schooner” (p. 179). Finally, the accelerating current bears Pym and Peters toward the apocalyptic cataract “with a hideous velocity” (p. 241).

That the pole is the controlling center of the conspiracy of weather, wind, and current that draws Pym southward is suggested shortly after Pym boards the Jane Guy, for he notes of sudden changes in wind direction that a “bright spot to the southward is the sure forerunner of the change” (p. 151). There is also a correlation between the southern bright spot and the water: in the canoe, Pym and Peters “were frequently surprised at perceiving, to our right and left, at different distances, sudden and extensive agitations of the surface—these, we at length noticed, were always preceded by wild flickerings in the region of the vapour to the southward” (p. 239). This vapor, which is sighted even before they reach Tsalal (p. 177), proves to be the “limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven” (p. 241). The opening of this “gigantic curtain,” as Pym calls it, suggests a revelation of the “secrets of the great Creator” that Morrell projects as forbidden, particularly because Pym speaks of the white birds coming from “beyond the veil” (p. 242).

Pym is also drawn southward on the shipwrecked Grampus. When found by the Jane Guy, the wreck “had drifted probably, from north to south, not less than five-and-twenty degrees!” (p. 149). That the voyagers are in the grip of forces beyond their control is emphasized by the loss of the Grampus' rudder: “We had all calculated that the rudder would hold its own to the last, as it was unusually strong, being rigged as I have never seen one rigged either before or since. … The tremendous force of the sea which tore it off may be estimated by the fact, that the hooks in the stern-post, which ran entirely through it, being clinched on the inside, were drawn every one of them completely out of the solid wood” (pp. 97-98). The forces that reduce the Grampus to a rudderless hulk and carry it with Pym and Peters a great distance to the south seem at one with the currents that later draw them aboard both the Jane Guy and the canoe toward the region marked by the polar cataract. Furthermore, the conjunction of these forces is not accidental.

II

The editor's note on the Tsalalian hieroglyphics implies that the wreck of the Grampus, the surprisingly open polar sea and mild polar weather, and the southward wind and current all manifest the divine injunction to go south that is “graven … within the hills” of Tsalal—the cave drawing of a figure gesturing southward with the accompanying texts “to be white” and “region of the south.” That Pym has been elected to carry out this injunction and thus to experience the revelation of the south polar mysteries is foreshadowed in his first adventure on the Ariel, which he presents “by way of introduction to a longer and more momentous narrative.”⁶

Pym is explicit about the apocalyptic and providential overtones of the opening episode: just before the shipwreck, “a loud and long scream or yell, as if from the throats of a thousand demons, seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere around and above the boat” (p. 10); after the rescue, his “deliverance seemed to have been brought about by two of those almost inconceivable pieces of good fortune which are attributed by the wise and pious to the special interference of Providence” (p. 12). Moreover, the episode clearly represents the first of an extended series of inexplicably lucky escapes for Pym, suggesting that his rescue here is the result not of some “special” providence, as he claims, but rather of a necessity to preserve him for the mission to the south. After regaining consciousness following the Ariel wreck, Pym relates the facts of his rescue with the comment that “the mystery of our being in existence was now … explained” (p. 11); but the explanation is so unlikely that it reinforces the implication that providential forces are shaping his destiny.

Pym's subsequent experiences continue to involve suggestively fortunate escapes while gradually shifting in kind from the improbable to the inexplicable to the supernatural. On board the Grampus, for example, Pym's confinement in the hold saves him from the mutineers, and the supposedly pestilent air there enables him to endure his long imprisonment by rendering him unconscious. About the crash of the bottle that August hears, Pym comments, “Fortunate, indeed, was it that the incident occurred—for, upon this incident, trivial as it appears, the thread of my destiny depended” (p. 64). With the shipwreck, good fortune increases: “a vessel with a cargo of empty oil-casks would not sink” (p. 99). Furthermore, although bereft of sail and rudder and completely at the mercy of the storm, the Grampus positions itself favorably for the survivors:

Owing to the brig's lying to so much along, we were all less liable to be washed off than otherwise would have been the case. The heel, as I have before stated, was to larboard, about one half of the deck being constantly under water. The seas, therefore, which struck us to starboard were much broken by the vessel's side, only reaching us in fragments as we lay flat on our faces; while those which came from larboard, being what are called back-water seas, and obtaining little hold upon us on account of our posture, had not sufficient force to drag us from our fastenings.

(pp. 100-101)

After the storm, “The sea was now quite smooth and as, from some cause which we could not determine, the brig did not lie so much along as she had done before, the deck was comparatively dry, and we could move about with freedom” (pp. 105-106). Later, another unexplainable but fortunate event occurs—the ship turns over, revealing barnacles on its bottom: “Thus, in two important respects, the accident we had so greatly dreaded proved a benefit rather than an injury; it had opened to us a supply of provisions which we could not have exhausted, using it moderately, in a month; and it had greatly contributed to our comfort as regards position, we being much more at our ease, and in infinitely less danger, than before” (p. 144).

As Pym moves further south, however, events become less accountable in terms of mere “good fortune” and naturalistic causes. In retrospect Pym can “explain” the events on the Ariel and in the hold of the Grampus but not the auspicious movements of the wrecked Grampus, and he admits that the ship of the dead will always be an “unfathomable mystery” (p. 114). Aboard the Jane Guy and on Tsalal, the mysteries intensify as Pym encounters strange creatures, unusual rock formations, purple water, and chasms which he can hardly believe are “altogether the work of nature” (p. 221), a judgment the reader must also apply to Pym and Peters' extremely improbable escape from the Tsalalians. The apocalyptic figure at the end thus climaxes a progressively marvelous southward journey that Pym seems not so much lucky to survive as destined to carry out.

III

Pym and his colleagues are not totally unaware of the possibility that the hand of God shapes their destinies. Just before the Ariel wreck, Pym “recommended [himself] to God,” although later he does not attribute his deliverance to that act. After failing to obtain food by diving into the Grampus storeroom, he and the other survivors seek divine intervention: “Throwing ourselves on our knees to God, we implored his aid in the many dangers which beset us; and arose with renewed hope and vigour to think what could yet be done by mortal means towards accomplishing our deliverance” (p. 108). Upon recovering a bottle of wine, they give “thanks to God for this timely and cheering assistance” (p. 116). When Parker suggests cannibalism, Pym describes himself “mentally praying to God for power to dissuade him from the horrible purpose he entertained” (p. 124). After they find a turtle in the storeroom, Pym says, “falling on our knees with one accord, we returned fervent thanks to God for so seasonable a relief” (p. 133). Pym recognizes that they had “providentially been delivered” (p. 135) and attributes their rescue to “the mercy of God.”⁷

Pym's sensitivity to the possibilities of such limited mercies is coupled with a growing, if wavering and never complete, awareness of a broader destiny at work in his life. Of the Ariel wreck he says only that others might attribute his rescue to providence, but on the Grampus he affirms divine intervention. After the Ariel adventure, he has “visions or desires” of “shipwrecks and famine,” which he regards “only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfill” (pp. 17-18), glimpses borne out by his experience at Tsalal. After seeing the purple water he remarks, “The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled” (p. 187). Thus “prophetic glimpses” give way to a “first definite link” as Pym progressively defines his sense of having a destiny to fulfill.

But Pym's perceptions are not complete. By calling the purple water the “first” definite link, he fails to recognize that providence has been at work from the very beginning of the narrative.⁸ Although he affirms particular providential incidents aboard the Grampus, he is unaware of a “chain” of miracles until he reaches the supernatural island of Tsalal, and even there, as the editor points out, he fails to see many “links.” Pym dismisses as “idle opinion” Peters' contention that the marks on the chasm wall are alphabetical characters, and, even when he sees the obviously supernatural white figure, he fails to connect it with the various forces that draw him southward. Nor are these the only instances of Pym's insensitivity. He laughs at Captain Guy's alarm at the southward wind and current (p. 179), and he fails to perceive a connection between the surprising presence of tortoises on Tsalal and the figure of one Captain Guy “fancied” he saw carved on the prow of a canoe on the “southern extremity” of the previous island (p. 177).

When writing Pym, Poe was also composing a review of John Lloyd Stephens' Arabia Petraea⁹ which presents a theologically conservative view of the literalness of prophecy, arguing that “in many striking cases, the words of the prophets have been brought to pass in every particular of a series of minutiae, whose meaning was unintelligible before the period of fulfilment” (X, 10). For Poe, “minuteness of detail” is “but a portion of the providential plan of the Deity for bringing more visibly to light … the evidence of the fulfilment of his word” (X, 9), an idea consistent with the fictional editor's suggestion that his notes on the ending of Pym “should be regarded … in connection with some of the most faintly detailed incidents of the narrative” (p. 245). Besides paralleling the theological implications of Pym, the review also suggests a justification of Pym's imperceptiveness.

Poe argues that the obscurity of prophecies, “like the apparently irrelevant detail, has its object in the providence of God.” For Poe, the seeming unintelligibility of prophecy prior to its fulfillment serves to reinforce belief in providence:

Were the words of inspiration, affording insight into the events of futurity, at all times so pointedly clear that he who runs might read, they would in many cases, even when fulfilled, afford a rational ground for unbelief in the inspiration of their authors, and consequently in the whole truth of revelation; for it would be supposed that these distinct words, exciting union and emulation among Christians, had thus been merely the means of working out their own accomplishment. It is for this reason that the most of the predictions become intelligible only when viewed from the proper point of observation—the period of fulfilment … Having seen palpably, incontrovertibly fulfilled, even one of these many wonderful predictions, of whose meaning, until the day of accomplishment, he could form no conception; and having thoroughly satisfied himself that no human foresight could have been equal to such amount of foreknowledge, he will await, in confident expectation, that moment certainly to come when the darkness of the veil shall be uplifted from the others.

(X, 10-11)

In this context, Pym's unawareness of the overall design of his voyage is further evidence that the completion of the antarctic journey is not his accomplishment, but that of providence, its obscurity prior to the apocalyptic ending actually revealing the divine nature of the voyage to the reader.

The editor suggests as much when, though uncertain of the meaning of Pym's text, he interprets its ending in terms of a “chain of connection” and sees the narrative as yielding significant knowledge to study and exegesis. He also says that Pym's account will “be verified or contradicted” by a government antarctic expedition (p. 243), so that even though Pym does not understand the divine injunction on the cavern walls, and even though the narrative remains incomplete, he fulfills his role as a mythic quest hero. Like Aeneas, Moses, and Christ, Pym must journey to a wilderness or southern “underworld” and return, presumably with some form of redemptive knowledge. He obeys the divine injunction to go south, learns what Morrell calls “the secrets of the great Creator,” and returns from the pole with his sacred text. Implicitly the government's expedition will not only verify Pym's account of the antarctic but also, in retrospect, fulfill and justify his prophetic role in a redemptive design for mankind.

IV

The implications of recognizing a providential design at work in Pym's experiences are several. Most crucially, the presence of a pattern of divine causation raises the issue of how well various human efforts to control and direct events align with the injunction to go south in its various meanings. That Poe invites such a comparison is implicit in another of his borrowings from Morrell, in this case a description of a penguin rookery; in the original text, the description concludes as follows:

A moral philosopher could not, perhaps, be more usefully employed, for a few days, than in contemplating the movements and operations of a South Sea rookery, and marking the almost incredible order and regularity with which every thing is performed. Such a spectator could not fail to confess, that so wonderful an instinct must be “the Divinity which stirs within” them.

(p. 53)

Poe's text closely paraphrases Morrell's overview of the penguins,¹⁰ but where the source emphasizes the “Divinity” of the rookery's orderliness, Pym refers only in general terms to the “reflection” the sight generates in “every well-regulated human intellect” (p. 157). Pym's lack of perception here is, of course, consistent with his characterization, but the reader is still able to recognize the possibility of divine ordering in the rookery through Poe's juxtaposition of it with the chaotic Tsalalian village, which has “no uniform plan” (p. 188). Indeed, when these natives exhibit order, it is covertly sinister. With regard to their respective spheres of existence, the divinely ordered rookery exemplifies providentially governed natural events, while the natives' evil represents the dark essence of human guile. Similarly, within the providential design of the narrative as a whole is a chaotic series of human plots and counterplots which spring not from divine order and will but from human depravity.

Such plots commence in the Ariel section of the narrative. Remarking that “Schoolboys … can accomplish wonders in the way of deception” (p. 16), Pym hides that adventure from his family and is guilty of “intense … hypocrisy pervading every word and action” (pp. 1-9), a deceitfulness characterizing human action throughout the story.¹¹ Once Pym leaves the security of home, he encounters hypocrisy and guile in others. His “burials” in the hold of the Grampus and in the chasms lead to “re-awakenings” or new realizations of the treachery of the mutineers and natives.¹² And he continues to reveal his own guile and potential for violence: the adjectives by which he describes the natives—“hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty” (p. 234)—also apply to himself. He deceives his family, plots against the mutineers, kills them and the natives, thinks of cannibalism (pp. 113, 123) before Parker suggests it, wants to trick Parker into losing the lottery, and judges that the natives who died in the explosion “seized the full and perfect fruits of their treachery” (p. 217). Although Pym often feels guilty and kills only in self-defense, he partakes of the evil he sees in others. The trip to the pole, then, is a revelation not only of the divine underpinning of the natural world, but also of human nature, and specifically of Pym's. As an exploration of the human and divine, the journey is both inward and outward.

The human plots in Pym also reveal the limitations of the materialistic goals which inform them, if only because the designs regularly end in disaster for those who conceive them. The mutineers are overpowered, the first mate is killed by the “ghost” of a man he allegedly poisoned, Parker dies victim of the cannibalism he himself suggested, and the natives are killed while plundering the ship whose crew they murdered. While Pym early participates in and is tainted by the corrupt means and aims of these human designs, he eventually expresses a nonmaterialistic yearning for knowledge about the pole that aligns him with the divine injunction that controls his destiny—the injunction to go south.

The implication that Pym's thirst for knowledge of the unknown fulfills a spiritual duty is suggested by yet another comparison with Morrell's narrative. Morrell justifies his antarctic voyage by arguing that it is not sacrilegious prying, but a spiritual triumph. Of the allegedly “impassable bulwark of indissoluble ice” he writes,

Admitting for a moment, however, that such is the fact, and that nothing less than a miracle could open the passage through this formidable barrier, I contend that genius, science, and energy combined can work such miracles, and even remove mountains; for what is a miracle but the power of spirit over matter—the triumph of mind over physical impediments. The march of intellect is irresistible; and were the earth itself one globe of ice, the fire of genius, directed by the wand of science, could melt a passage to its center.

(pp. 29-30)

Poe expresses a similar notion in a “Marginalia” item discussing reason or the capacity to known as intrinsic to man and essential to his fulfillment:

Man's chief idiosyncrasy being reason, it follows that his savage condition—his condition of action without reason—is his unnatural state. The more he reasons, the nearer he approaches the position to which this chief idiosyncrasy irresistibly impels him; and not until he attains this position with exactitude—not until his reason has exhausted itself for his improvement—not until he has stepped upon the highest pinnacle of civilization—will his natural state be ultimately reached, or thoroughly determined.

(XVI, 6-7)

Pym is the story of just such a quest for fulfillment through reason and the pursuit of knowledge, as opposed to material interest. Although at first Pym unwittingly obeys the divine commandment to head south, as the story progresses his motive for voyaging increasingly becomes a disinterested quest for knowledge. In going to sea in the first place, Pym sacrifices his expectations of inheritance from his wealthy grandfather (pp. 5, 18). By the time he is aboard the Jane Guy, Pym recognizes that “a wide field lay open before us for discovery, and it was with feelings of most intense interest that I heard Captain Guy express his resolution of pushing boldly to the southward” (p. 171). Later, when the captain wants to turn back, Pym's “intense interest” becomes explicitly scientific:

So tempting an opportunity for solving the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded to man, and I confess that I felt myself bursting with indignation at the timid and ill-timed suggestions of our commander. I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention.

(p. 178)

The suggestion to turn back is ill-timed because of the ideal sailing conditions. As Pym says, “All hands on board now felt certain of attaining the pole” (p. 175). The southward tendency of the current and wind alarm Captain Guy, but Pym, while unaware of the theological implications, correctly interprets these conditions as signs to continue southward. Later, he again disagrees with Captain Guy:

We also saw some bêche de mer in the hands of one of the savages, who was greedily devouring it in its natural state. These anomalies, for they were such when considered in regard to the latitude, induced Captain Guy to wish for a thorough investigation of the country, in the hope of making a profitable speculation on his discovery. For my own part, anxious as I was to know something more of these islands, I was still more earnestly bent on prosecuting the voyage to the southward without delay. We had now fine weather, but there was no telling how long it would last; and being already in the eighty-fourth parallel, with an open sea before us, a current setting strongly to the southward, and the wind fair, I could not listen with any patience to a proposition of stopping longer than was absolutely necessary for the health of the crew and the taking on board a proper supply of fuel and fresh provisions.

(p. 184)

As opposed to Pym, Captain Guy's main interest (like that of the mutineers and natives) is not knowledge, but “profitable speculation.” The men's stay on the island to set up a hut for curing bêche de mer and to reach a trade agreement with the natives results in their deaths. Had they followed Pym's advice, they might have gained the benefits of the island—rest, fuel, provisions—without fatal consequences. Perhaps the crew falls victim to the pseudobiblical “vengeance upon the dust within the rock” (p. 245), for Pym's description of the landslide suggests that it is a divine judgment: “I was suddenly aware of a concussion resembling nothing I had ever before experienced, and which impressed me with a vague conception, if indeed I then thought of anything, that the whole foundations of the solid globe were suddenly rent asunder, and that the day of universal dissolution was at hand” (p. 203). As elsewhere, Pym has only a partial sense of the theological significance of the event. Yet he, who sacrifices wealth for the sake of the southward journey, survives, because he sees “one or two stunted shrubs growing from the crevices, bearing a species of filbert which [he] felt some curiosity to examine, and pushed in briskly for that purpose” (p. 202). His scientific curiosity and “brisk” pursuit save him (and Peters who follows him) from the landslide, enabling him to continue his journey southward toward “a region of novelty and wonder.” In this increasingly disinterested quest, Pym resembles John Lloyd Stephens, whom Poe praises for eschewing “the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites” (X, 25). Indeed, Pym manifests what Paul John Eakin identifies as “the Poe hero's lust for final knowledge.”¹³

In contrast, the Tsalalians exemplify greed and primitive ignorance. In terms of Poe's “Marginalia” comment on reason, they are “unnatural savages”; in refusing to strive for a “high pinnacle of civilization,” they fail to fulfill their human potential. The fear of going south is a fear of exploring the secrets of the Creator, a trepidation for which they are condemned to live in darkness. According to the editor's translation of the hieroglyphs, to live on Tsalal is “to be shady.” From the Ethiopian word, as the editor suggests, come “all the inflections of shadow or darkness” (p. 244). To the obvious inflections of “evil” and “treachery” might be added that of ignorance. From the Arabic “to be white” come “all the inflections of brilliancy and whiteness” (p. 244), and to the obvious inflections of goodness, truth, and divinity might be added that of knowledge. The natives fear knowledge, both of the mysteries of the Creator, as suggested by their fear of the polar brilliance, and of themselves, as manifested in their fear of mirrors.

The commandments “graven … within the hills” refer to the polarity between ignorance and knowledge, and the “vengeance upon the dust within the rock” is most obviously against those who exemplify the human condition when it resists knowing the divine order and will. By leaving the narrative “unfinished,” Poe avoids the problem of depicting the secrets of the Creator which Pym sees, while, at the same time specifying that Pym does survive the voyage, affirming that the journey is not forbidden. Pym is prevented not from experiencing the mysteries of the south pole but from telling what he learns there.¹⁴ His Narrative is a prophetic text contrasting the aborted materialistic pursuits of the other characters to Pym's completed spiritual quest for knowledge, both human and divine, inner and outer. He enacts a providential role in a redemptive design for mankind, fulfilling Morrell's call for the “march of intellect” and the exploration of “the secrets of the great Creator.”

Notes

1. A summary of much earlier discussion of the ending of Pym is in J. V. Ridgely, “Tragical-Mythical-Satirical-Hoaxical: Problems of Genre in Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 24 (Fall 1974), pp. 4-9. Later discussions of archetypal patterns of descent and spiritual rebirth include Barton Levi St. Armand, “The Dragon and the Uroborus: Themes of Metamorphosis in Arthur Gordon Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 37 (Winter 1978), pp. 57-71; and Grace Farrell Lee, “Pym and Moby Dick: Essential Connections,” in the same issue, pp. 73-86. John Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 64-223, discusses Pym as an exploration of the related origins of language and of human consciousness, with the white mist at the end signifying the “abyss” or undifferentiated unity of prelinguistic and preconscious experience: “What the ending of Pym acts out, then, is ‘a certain tendency of the human intellect’ (inscribed within it by the very structure of its birth) to try to survive death by projecting an image of itself (the self as image) into the infinite void of the abyss” (p. 205). For Irwin, the white figure at the end is Pym's own projection or “white shadow.”

2. For discussion of religious allusions and aspects of the Tsalal section and the ending, see Sidney Kaplan, “Introduction” to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), pp. vii-xxv, who discusses the tale as a racist allegory; J. V. Ridgely, “The End of Pym and the Ending of Pym,” in Richard P. Veler, ed., Papers on Poe (Springfield, Ohio: Chantry Music Press, 1972), pp. 104-112, who argues that the white figure at the pole and the Tsalalians are the descendants of ancient civilizations; and Richard Wilbur, “Introduction” to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Boston: David R. Godine, 1973), pp. vii-xxv, who sees a pattern of a gnostic reunion of the voyager's soul with God. All regard the Tsalalians as an ancient race damned according to biblical prophecy.

3. For discussion of Poe's borrowings from Morrell, see D. M. McKeithan, “Two Sources of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” University of Texas Studies in English, 13 (1933), 116-137; Burton R. Pollin, “The Narrative of Benjamin Morrell: Out of the ‘Bucket’ and into Poe's Pym,” Studies in American Fiction, 4 (1976), 157-172.

4. The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (1904; rpt. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1965), III, 170; hereafter cited in the text.

5. Captain Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1832), p. 30; hereafter cited in the text by page numbers.

6. William Peden, “Prologue to a Dark Journey: The ‘Opening’ to Poe's Pym,” in Papers on Poe, pp. 84-91, sees the Ariel shipwreck as foreshadowing the “glut of violence and the surreal” and existential absurdity expressed in the later sections of the novel. Charles O’Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight into Space,” PMLA, 77 (1962), 85-91, concludes that the apocalyptic descriptions of the Ariel wreck and the white figure indicate that Pym is rescued in the same way both times—by a passing ship, with the white figure as Pym's dim, dreamy perception of “a figurehead, sail, or prow of a ship.”

7. Pp. 146-147. For an iconographical study of providential shipwreck narratives in early American literature, see Jane Donahue, “Colonial Shipwreck Narratives,” Books at Brown, 23 (1969), 101-119.

8. J. Gerald Kennedy, “‘The Infernal Twoness’ in Arthur Gordon Pym,” Topic, 30 (1976), 41-53, discusses Pym's imperceptiveness but sees him as a naive, “perpetual dupe in a duplicitous world” and argues that the “initiated reader laughs at Pym” for trusting “human nature, Providence, and his own impressions.”

9. Alexander Hammond, “The Composition of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: Notes Toward a Re-Examination,” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 37 (Winter 1978), pp. 1-20.

10. Charles O’Donnell, “From Earth to Ether: Poe's Flight Into Space,” suggests that the Penguin, the ship that runs down the Ariel, links the initial apocalyptic wreck with the south pole. Joel Porte, The Romance in America (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1969), p. 92, sees both the Penguin and penguins as symbols “of radical ambiguousness in nature.”

11. For discussion of patterns of deception in Pym, see Patrick F. Quinn, “Poe's Imaginary Voyage,” Hudson Review, 4 (1952), 562-585; Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 156-181.

12. Leonard W. Engel, “Edgar Allan Poe's Use of the Enclosure Device in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, (1978), 35-44, concludes that “at every crisis in Pym's life, he experiences some kind of confinement which horrifies him yet, ironically, guarantees his safety, and he emerges from it with an illuminating awareness of himself and the world that he did not have before.” See also Paul Rosenzweig, “The Search for Identity: The Enclosure Motif in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” ESQ, 26 (1980), 111-126, for the psychological implications of the enclosure patterns.

13. Eakin, “Poe's Sense of an Ending,” American Literature, 45 (1973), 21.

14. Eakin, p. 21, writes that Pym “survived—but he died” and that this “equivocation, then, of the double ending of Pym does not cast the existence of meaning in doubt but rather man's capacity to apprehend it.”