The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827.
1838
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827.
1838
Edgar Allan Poe's sole complete novel begins as a rollicking Nantucket sea adventure and descends into something far stranger and more disturbing. Young Arthur Gordon Pym, obsessed with the sea from childhood, stows away aboard the whaler Grampus with his friend Augustus, the captain's son. What follows is a cascade of horrors: mutiny, shipwreck, starvation, and cannibalism among the desperate survivors. Pym emerges bloodied but alive, only to continue southward aboard the Jane Guy, where he and the savage-looking sailor Dirk Peters encounter hostile black-skinned natives on a remote island and flee back to sea. The novel ends abruptly mid-sentence, Pym and Peters sailing toward the Antarctic in a scene of eerie, biblical whiteness. Poe called it "a very silly book," but the reading public in 1838 disagreed, making it a commercial success. Its allegorical weight, psychological intensity, and restless reach toward the unknown influenced Melville's Moby-Dick, Verne's Antarctic adventures, and Lovecraft's cosmic terrors. For readers who want to see Poe flexing beyond the short story, this is the wild, uneven, fascinating result.
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“In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data.””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural;””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“Un instante después mi ser sentíase penetrado de un inmenso deseo de caer, una ansia, una ternura hacia el abismo, una pasión absolutamente indominable.””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“the penguin,””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“– a narrative, let me here say, which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity, that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements.””
— Edgar Allan Poe
“From absolute stupor they appeared to be, all at once, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement, and rushed wildly about, going to and from a certain point on the beach, with the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity depicted on their countenances, and shouting, at the top of their voices, Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!””
— Edgar Allan Poe
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Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827.. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym-of-nantucket-comprising-the-details-of-a-muti-a8f9a98a-1cd5-4d79-a50f-626576b368e4.Poe, E. A. (1838). The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827.. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym-of-nantucket-comprising-the-details-of-a-muti-a8f9a98a-1cd5-4d79-a50f-626576b368e4Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Comprising the Details of a Mutiny and Atrocious Butchery on Board the American Brig Grampus, on Her Way to the South Seas, in the Month of June, 1827.. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym-of-nantucket-comprising-the-details-of-a-muti-a8f9a98a-1cd5-4d79-a50f-626576b368e4.
