Playful Prodding with Unease Underneath – Tangential Digressions in Arthur Gordon Pym

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was an interesting change in form for Edgar Allen Poe. The twenty-four-chapter novel is a serious stylistic break from Poe’s short stories and even from Poe’s own opinion that “there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art—the limit of a single sitting.”^[1] Artistic ideals aside, writing Pym offered Poe an opportunity to capitalize on a recent craze for exploration narrative, which he took.^[2]

Despite mimicking other books in the genre, Poe still made several interesting artistic choices throughout the narrative, including frequently removing the narrator from witnessing the action of the story and inserting lengthy (sometimes plagiarized) tangents throughout the book on topics like the social structure of penguins and albatrosses, Galapagos tortoise anatomy, or various methods of keeping a ship stationary. Chapter six of Pym provides an excellent microcosm of these features. In this chapter, Poe disrupts the story with a four-paragraph digression on proper ship stowage practices. To the extent that there is any action in the plot, it is relayed by a narrator who is hiding in the ships hull, unable to observe anything.

It would be easy to dismiss these features as an act of laziness or conformity on Poe’s part: in many ways, these features match the exploration narratives that Poe was attempting to mimic. Examining Poe’s stylistic twists in this chapter, however, reveals a two-sided image of Poe that is pursuing far more than a quick buck. On one hand is an author playing games with the reader, forcing them to constantly reconsider his narrator’s credibility and slowly realize that the entire story is a farce. On the other is an author anxious about the reception of his writing and desperate for control over the reader, using every strategy he has at his disposal to keep the reader in suspense. Even though he can’t control the ‘unified impression’ of a longer narrative, Poe uses gamesmanship and control in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the reader and shape their experience with Pym.

For more on Poe’s work unintentionally revealing his subconscious, see:

“Berenice” ; The Virginian Gentleman’s Review, by Emi O’Brochta

Reflections on Silken and Poe, by Jess Quintero

My main text comes from:

Edgar Allan Poe, “Chapter VI.” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Harper & Brothers, 1838, pp. 59-67. eapoe.org/works/editions/pymbc.htm.