The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Jul. 5th, 2006 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
joysilence posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
darkling_talesLJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is part sea story, part adventure story, part horror story. It’s the story of a young man who runs away to sea and gets more than he bargained for. Mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, and that’s just for starters. It’s really in some ways a tall tale – the indirect way Poe tells the story, in the form of a story told to him by Pym, draws attention to the fact that it is a story and that the reader has no way of knowing how true it is. As the tale progresses it gets weirder, as Pym finds himself exploring the Antarctic, which turns out to be stranger than anyone had expected. I believe this novel inspired Lovecraft’s choice of an Antarctic setting for his own novel At the Mountains of Madness. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is in some ways a lost world story, with a strange Antarctic civilisation. What I like most about the book is that Poe doesn’t try to explain everything – he reports strange and mysterious events and hints of things that may be even stranger, but they’re left ambiguous. There’s also some intriguing use of colour symbolism, with white being very significant – as you’d expect in a story about the Antarctic, but not in the way Poe uses it. I didn’t like this novel as much as I’ve liked some of his short stories but it’s still a fascinating little book.
x-posted
dfordoom)Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is part sea story, part adventure story, part horror story. It’s the story of a young man who runs away to sea and gets more than he bargained for. Mutiny, shipwreck, cannibalism, and that’s just for starters. It’s really in some ways a tall tale – the indirect way Poe tells the story, in the form of a story told to him by Pym, draws attention to the fact that it is a story and that the reader has no way of knowing how true it is. As the tale progresses it gets weirder, as Pym finds himself exploring the Antarctic, which turns out to be stranger than anyone had expected. I believe this novel inspired Lovecraft’s choice of an Antarctic setting for his own novel At the Mountains of Madness. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is in some ways a lost world story, with a strange Antarctic civilisation. What I like most about the book is that Poe doesn’t try to explain everything – he reports strange and mysterious events and hints of things that may be even stranger, but they’re left ambiguous. There’s also some intriguing use of colour symbolism, with white being very significant – as you’d expect in a story about the Antarctic, but not in the way Poe uses it. I didn’t like this novel as much as I’ve liked some of his short stories but it’s still a fascinating little book.
x-posted
