The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The novel has a number of features that highlight its status as a fictional document. Using pastiche, it combines different kinds of storytelling and incorporates various outside texts into the original narrative; it also uses the Preface and End Note as meta-narrative, a self-conscious reflection on itself. Critics have argued about how intentional these moments of self-awareness are. Many of them point out that some of the novel’s factual errors and narrative inconsistencies were accidental products of Poe’s troubled writing process and ever-changing timeline. Others, however, argue that Poe was trying to highlight the artificial—and often arbitrary—nature of any fictional text.

An example of this can be found roughly halfway through the text, while Pym, Peters, and Augustus are trapped on the wreckage of the Grampus. Suddenly, the structure of the story shifts: Pym is no longer simply recounting the details of his life in the first-person past tense; instead, he is recording the passage of days as if in a journal. This change happens for no discernible reason. While it does not appear to have any impact on the content of the text, as Pym continues describing his struggles to survive, it highlights the malleable nature of fiction. If authors want to make this kind of change, they simply can, and they are not required to explain it.

A similar shift happens later, as the Jane Guy approaches the Kerguelen Islands on its southward journey. Rather than narrating the events happening around him, Pym begins including long digressions on South Pacific history, geography, and biodiversity. Scholars have identified some of these passages as being taken directly from other sources. While Poe rarely cites these sources and simply incorporates them into Pym’s narration, he does allow Pym to acknowledge these digressions. For example, before providing historical information about the islands of Tristan d’Acunha, Pym says:

Before entering upon this portion of my narrative, it may be as well, for the information of those readers who have paid little attention to the progress of discovery in these regions, to give some brief account of the very few attempts at reaching the southern pole which have hitherto been made (104).

Here, the text draws attention to both its own artificial structure and to the fact that readers will engage with it in a wide variety of ways.

Perhaps the most significant way that Poe “constructs” the narrative is with the Preface and End Note, both of which explicitly alter the nature of the larger story. The Preface, in a number of ways, intentionally confuses questions of authenticity and identity, suggesting that Pym is a real person, and Poe is a fictional one. It also implies that the fictional story might appear false but is actually using this false appearance—the “air of fable”—to pass itself off as true (2). This labyrinthine justification seems designed to appease readers who expect either truth or fantasy and allows Poe to avoid firmly claiming either one. The End Note confuses these issues even further by suggesting that the entire novel is a hoax and that the original editor—the fictional Poe—left the project because of “the general inaccuracy of the details afforded him, and his disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narrative” (153). Some critics suggest that the End Note is an attempt to distract readers from what was generally seen as an unsatisfactory ending to the story. Essentially, in this view, it serves as evidence that Poe wanted to disavow a work that he later called “very silly.” Regardless, the End Note allows Poe to double down on the idea that imaginative literature is a visibly constructed form of storytelling, one that often consists of multiple layers of fiction and sometimes even multiple voices or perspectives.