venture farther south. Eventually, they see a strange white-haired mammal with red teeth and claws float by. In the novel’s final scene, as their canoe rushes into a cataract, a huge “shrouded human figure” with perfectly white skin appears before them. No explanation is provided after the journal stops short.

The appearance of the strange figure at the end of the novel has been variously explained as being almost everything from a divinity, to a Titan guarding the hole at the South Pole, to a sail or figurehead from a ship seen by a deluded Pym. The incident has been explained as the ultimate metaphysical enigma or as an emblem of epistemological questioning of perception, reality, or language itself. Perhaps Poe succeeded in this “hodgepodge” novel of mixed descriptions, tones of voice, styles, genres, and intentions in making what he once described as the “ludicrous heightened into the grotesque.”

Grampus

Grampus. Whaling ship captained by the father of Pym’s friend Augustus Barnard in which Pym becomes a stowaway. The secret compartment in the hold that Augustus prepares for Pym seems to have all the comforts of home. However, the labyrinthine snug space quickly turns into a premature burial, a nightmarish coffin, filled only with rotten food and a threatening dog, lacking fresh water, and leaving Pym confined and cut off for a long time from communication with Augustus or the ship’s crew.

Once aboard the Grampus, Pym observes butchery, mutiny, murder, a Dutch “death” ship of rotting corpses, starvation, and, eventually, cannibalism. However, each description of nightmarish despair on the ship is suddenly followed by one of hopeful salvation. For example, when the ship rolls over at sea, it reveals barnacles on its hull that the starving members of its crew can eat. Descriptions of the Grampus reveal the endless oscillations of despair and hope, of torture and release, of near destruction and salvation that allow Pym to feel the perverse pleasures of suffering and despair that early in the novel he says he desires to experience.

Tsalal Island

Tsalal Island. Lush wooded island, full of plants, streams, and game, that is discovered within the Antarctic Circle by the crew of the Jane Guy as it sails toward the South Pole. The island is inhabited by people who are completely black—including the color of their teeth—and who are frightened by everything white. On the island, members of the ship’s crew discover a variety of odd creatures, such as black albatrosses and black-wooled animals. Pym and Dirk Peters are the only members of the crew left alive after the islanders kill all their companions.

After earlier chapters provide documentary-like descriptions of nature, the novel suddenly infuses the strange island of black and white polarities with elements of symbolism and surrealism that emphasize the temptation of the forbiddingly mysterious and the inaccessibly sublime. For example, a rocky ledge is described as looking like “corded bales of cotton.” The water appears to be in “layers,” colored like silk, with distinct purplish “veins.”

*Kergulen’s or Desolation Islands

*Kergulen’s or Desolation Islands. Group of islands in the southern Indian Ocean located near Southern Africa. Chapters describing the actual history of exploration of these islands are mostly lifted from published accounts, primarily those of Captain James Cook. Pym’s extensive descriptions of birds and other animals on the islands can be found in other sources. Poe’s heavy reliance upon these sources also helps explain the gaps in Pym’s journal and the erratic, zigzag course Pym takes around the Cape of Good Hope to Kergulen’s or Desolation Islands, back to the Islands of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, and then southward in the Antarctic Circle to the Island of Tsalal and finally toward the South Pole. The overall effect is to hoax the reader by making the voyages seem credible with an overload of details, facts, nautical terms, and verifiable history.