The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is a pivotal work in which Poe calls attention to the act of writing and to the problem of representing the truth. It is an archetypal American story of escape from domesticity tracing a young man's rite of passage through a series of terrible brushes with death during a fateful sea voyage. This rousing sea adventure follows a New England boy, Pym, who stows away on a whaling ship with its captain's son, Augustus. The two boys, who find themselves repeatedly on the brink of discovery or death, witness many hair-raising events, including mutiny, savagery, cannibalism, and frantic pursuits. An unusually restrained Edgar Allan Poe strips away his more poetic tendencies as well as his luscious prose in this story, his only novel. The result is an adventure that is grim, Grim, GRIM...and so ends up feeling much like Poe after all, despite the shift in style.