Customer Reviews

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Unbelievably, Poe wrote a single novel - "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket." The book was published in 1838 and is perhaps less nightmarish than the majority of Poe's writing. However, it's a rousing good sea-faring book. As is true of many novels of the period, the book is told in first person narrative and almost diary form. Arthur Gordon Pym is a young man who through a series of extraordinary events, finds himself a stowaway on a whaling ship. However, that's just the beginning of his adventures, as he finds himself repeatedly thrust into the most unbelievable of situations.

"Narrative" sometimes reads like a series of tall tales and requires a complete suspension of belief, but if you're able to do so, then it's a terrific story. I read most of the novel on a long train trip and it held my attention completely. I'm not normally a fan of "adventure" books, but "Narrative" is an exciting, brief read. Adults of all tastes are likely to enjoy this book as well as older youngsters who enjoy sea-faring stories and adventure. Finally, the introduction, by Richard Kopley, does a great job explaining the novel's subtext, which adds greatly to the reading experience.

This story, Poe's only novel, is an endurance test for both reader and characters. I believe it was originally serialized, and reads like a collection of incidents rather than a complete story. However, it is a captivating tale, astounding in it's detail and casual horror. Arthur Gordon Pym was born under an unlucky star. He survives in the most inconceivable circumstances, from a drifting, overturned hulk to the frozen waters of the Antarctic. Each page turned piles more horror in his path, described with a growing clinical distance. Pym himself becomes more desensitized to each incident, until he views the irrational with a casual curiosity. The language is beautifully detailed, and some feel this story is the inspiration for "Moby Dick."

Altogether, a delightfully disturbing story. One of the best I have read.

Arthur Gordon Pym was a young man who had dreams of great adventure. He defied his family and stowed away on board a whaling ship. Doing this lead him into all sorts of exciting adventures. He confronted things like mutiny, near starvation, and altercations with different cultures.

I'd have to say that this story is "classic Poe". If you are a fan of Poe's short stories, you'll definitely like this book. I only had a few problems with the story. There were times that the story dragged, but this is far outweighed by the times that the story was very exciting, and I couldn't put the book down. I won't go into the ending, but it left me unsettled.

I found that the explanatory notes were very helpful. I'm not a great scholar on any level, nor will I ever claim to be. The explanatory notes were very simple to understand, and it helped me understand portions of the story that caused confusion, particularly the end.

Poe's only novel reminded me of Gogol's "Dead Souls," in that, in both, the story seems to take a weird turn toward the end and shuts down rather oddly. Gogol's excuse is that he became a fire-breathing convert to Christianity midway through writing his book, and so had no use for the book's initial cynical tone (instead we get a character rant on in socio-religious mode for awhile). I don't know what Poe's excuse is, but the effect of his end-of-story turn is remarkable, and I won't spoil it for you (unlike other reviewers below - warning!). There is a vivid, dreamlike, unsettling quality to the whole book, and (with the exception of a few dull pages of sailing life detail - not unlike "Moby Dick," but with nowhere near as much page-filling excess) there is rip-roaring action from start to finish. Poe's yarn is full of incident, and every bit of it counts. So at midnight, lock the door, sit back, put your feet up, and soak up this book in the dim light of your hurricane lamp. It's, after all, one of many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore!

Suspense and horror pervade Poe's full-length story of entombment, mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, and more--a veritable catalog of all the human fears and foibles that Poe depicts in his more widely read tales of mystery and imagination.

The novel opens with a prefatory episode, in which Pym describes a truly harrowing night at sea when he and his best friend Augustus, after having far too much to drink, went sailing during a storm. Instead of curing Pym of his wanderlust, the experience and Augustus's anecdotes about sea life fill his head with abnormally romantic visions of "shipwreck and famine; of captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some grey and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown." It's an accurate summary of what ensues, and although it may sound a lot like Defoe, Poe livens things up with his own special brand of horror.

After this preview, the rest of the novel feels like two main stories patched together around a central character. In the first adventure, Pym stows away on the ship owned by Augustus's father and emerges to discover that there has been a mutiny. The second half imagines a sort of "lost horizon" in the midst of Antarctica; instead of ice, there are temperate islands populated by devilishly affectionate natives.

It's rip-roaring fun, and it slows down only in between, when Pym travels through the Galapagos Islands on the way to the South Pole. These chapters, paraphrased and plagiarized rather shamelessly from contemporary travel accounts, abound in longitudinal measurements (a map will come in handy) and summaries of previous real-life explorations of the South Seas. The interlude as a whole is remarkably similar to Poe's unfinished (and languid) novel, "The Journal of Julius Rodman," published two years later, which also purports to be an account of unexplored territory--in this case, the Rocky Mountains. The fact that Poe had never been to either location doesn't help his fiction.

But don't let these skimmable chapters put you off. Readers who enjoy such classics as "Robinson Crusoe" or "Treasure Island" will find "Arthur Gordon Pym" a thrilling contribution to the adventure genre. It is also one of his more accessible works for young readers, often resembling a yarn of the high seas, without the ponderous metaphysics that bog down some of Poe's shorter pieces of fiction. And fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror will be interested in the novel's obvious influence on later writers such as Jules Verne (who even wrote a largely forgotten sequel, "The Sphinx of the Ice Fields") and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft (most notably his story "At the Mountains of Madness").

when it comes to things to shudder about, poe pulls out all the stops here- being buried alive, starvation, overwhelming thirst, ritual murder, cannibalism, insanity, etc.

mixing factual and fantastical elements, this rich little novel is on the surface a gothic tale of seafaring adventure. but it is so filled with haunting images of suffering and amazing, fantastic discoveries it burrows into your subconcious.

the wonderfully inconclusive termination of the narrative further adds to the feeling of awe.

This is the dark narrative of the misadventures of a young man from New England. Pym has a big illusion of going to the sea, and so, secretly, he embarks in a ship. But the ship suffers a mutiny on board, led by ruthless and cruel men. After several days of storms and hunger, there is a shipwreck. The three survivors are rescued by another ship, whose crew is in search for the South Pole. Many adventures follow, and the end of the book is really horrifying.

Beyond the plot, the importance of this novel is in the anguished and hair-rising mood it conveys. The relatively realistic beginning becomes a sort of magical horror gradually. It's like some Verne novel told in a hallucinated tone, feverish, tense, absolutely Poe. It will keep you constantly in tension, without pauses nor calm episodes, crossing the border of sanity.

Obviously I am the first reviewer to give this story only a 3 star rating. Why? I love and enjoy Poe's shorter stories and also his poetry. Yet the novel clearly is not his metier. Young Pym goes to sea in order to find adventure - and he truly finds it. One grotesque adventure is followed by an even more grotesque occurence and so forth. Thus the book gives a feeling as if a series of scenes were shown, the only connection between the individual parts being the narrator. Yes, many immages of beauty can be found, inspirational images. But these do not yet make for a good book. And at the very end Poe also realizes that he does not really have a novel on his hands. Thus he ends abruptly, claiming that the final chapters have been lost.
Stylistically this novel is also far more uneven than the short stories of Poe, maybe because his wild and fertile imagination has to match each and every picture in the book with its respective style. Yet this being a narrative, I would have expected that Arthur Gordon Pym tells it, with his characteristica - and not a new kind of Pym on every other page. Thus the style adds further to the feeling that the book is merely a disjointed heap of images, thrown together into a novel rather than individually being developed into short stories or poems.

Claiming that this is the true narrative of a sea voyage by Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allen Poe records the strange, unbelievable events aboard the ship Grampus in 1827 and on a voyage of discovery to the Antarctic six months later. Published in 1838, Poe's fictionalized narrative, supposedly penned by Pym, a young man from Nantucket, describes Pym's experiences beginning in July, 1827. Stowed away in the hold of the ship and aided by his friend Augustus Barnard, whose father is captain of the Grampus, Pym endures more than a week alone and in almost total darkness before he discovers that a mutiny has occurred onboard.

Macabre details of ghastly deaths and unrelieved bloodlust, the massacre of the crew, and the casting adrift of the captain presage even more gory events. A countermutiny, equally bloody, leaves only four men alive on the Grampus. A gale, a gruesome death ship which passes them, circling sharks, and additional deaths leave only two men alive when the brig capsizes.

The second half of the account details the trip of discovery taken by Pym and the other survivor, along with an English crew from a passing ship, south to the "Antarctic Sea," a voyage in which they go "more than eight degrees farther south than any previous navigators." On this journey they encounter a monstrous "Arctic bear," more than 15 feet long, a cat-like animal with red teeth and claws, warm water with Galapagos tortoises, a series of islands inhabited by canoe-paddling natives, the Aurora Borealis, hot and milky water, white ashy showers, and a huge human figure in white, not the sights reported by later Antarctic explorers.

Poe's only novel, in the romantic tradition of sea adventures, presages the publication of Melville's Typee, which is a true story. In this case, Poe plays with the reader's sense of reality, claiming that his fictional narrative is true and that the fictional Pym had "refused" to publish it because he thought no one would believe his tale. Ironies abound, matched only by the romantic embellishments and imaginative "discoveries" in Antarctica that make this fast-paced narrative as full of tense drama as any soap opera. The abrupt "conclusion" remains ironically inconclusive. Breathless excitement and near death experiences, combined with mystical visions and inexplicable events, make this exciting narrative fun to read. Mary Whipple

This is the "true story" of Pym, a young man who sets off on a series of increasingly implausible (and increasingly gruesome) sea adventures, which ultimately take him to some very strange places.

"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" is Poe's only novel - one I had for a long time hesitated to pick up. I had read most of Poe's more famous short stories, and, though I had liked some, I found others too dreary, confusing, morbid and tiresome. Hence, I was in no hurry to pick up a novel-length story what was reputed to be one of his less successful and accessible works.

Too bad. I have finally read it and it is by far the most fun I have ever had reading Poe. The story immediately caught me and kept me turning pages, chuckling with evil glee, every step of the way. The deliriously off-the-wall ending, which has dissatisfied many, to me seemed perfect. It is sad that it was not a success during his lifetime.

"Pym" inspired the H.P. Lovecraft horror novelette, AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, which I also enjoyed. They are very different works, and not really comparable. But if I had to choose, I would have to say that I like "Pym" better.