Product Description

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Poe's only novel and his "greatest work" (Jorge Luis Borges).

Reading a newspaper account in 1836 of a shipwreck and subsequent rescue of two men on board, Edgar Allan Poe found the germ of the story he would develop into The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket--his classic gothic sea novel. Published in 1838, 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. It was Poe's unique genius, however, that he imbued the deliberately popular tale with such allegorical richness that discerning readers have been intrigued ever since and his literary successors have employed his motifs. With its rich use of biblical imagery and psychological insights, Poe's masterpiece has resonated throughout subsequent literary history, influencing major works by Melville, Verne, James, Nabokov, and others.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #216465 in Books
• Published on: 1999-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
?It is Poe?s greatest work.??Jorge Luis Borges -- Review

Review
“It is Poe’s greatest work.”—Jorge Luis Borges

From the Inside Flap
After reading an 1836 newspaper account of a shipwreck and its two survivors, Edgar Allan Poe penned his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the story of a stowaway on a Nantucket whaleship who finds himself enmeshed in the dark side of life at sea: mutiny, cannibalism, savagery—even death. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his Introduction: "[Poe] remains contemporary because he appeals to basic human feelings and expresses universal themes common to all men in all languages: dreams, love, loss; grief, mourning, alienation; terror, revenge, murder; insanity, disease, and death." Within the pages of this novel, we encounter nearly all of them.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic reprints the text of the original 1838 American edition.

Customer Reviews

His only novel...
Luis Mejia - Poe's Narrarive of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was his first and only complete novel; or at least nearly complete. The power of tension Poe reflects on the near of the whole plot is remarkable and admirable; it doesn't gets painful-like tense, but rather giving space to a crude sense of judgement. This novel doesn't only gets short in plot, but it is always extremely interesting and specially questioning, to the point of even asking the sanity of the own author (which generally happens with each of his narrations). The story is set on a classic sea environment, in which the protagonist is caught up on a terrifying scene of encagement, mutiny, canibalism, sea roughnes, insanity, and finally the arrival to a mysterious land of madness possesed by a number of merciless aborigeans. And all at the end, the former capitan and Arthur see themselves caught into a myst and...puff! the plot dissapeared and a number of "literary excuses" are given to reduce it's incompleteness. You see, the work is literary weak, even for a somewhat amateur but undoubtly base author like Edgar Allan Poe, but it gets delightful and even musical for it's extended themes and awkward situations; where the points of even comedy vs horror is set harshly (as you may notice to confuse some of Poe's comedy stories like the spectacles with sick suspense). An adventure tale of deception, thoughtful explanations, passages of philosophy, representation, and uncanny suspense matter is the whole that The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket gives off, but yet making it a complete novel, I stick to Poe onto terms in which "writers write novels because they can't make a good short story". And to my recomendation, Edgar Allan Poe is definitively a short story man.

Fascinating but deperssing tale of life at sea
Wow, when I first started to read this book I had no idea what it was about at all. I am glad I read it though. It is a tale of a poor young lad going out to sea for adventure, only to have the most nightmarish and strange tragedies befall him in rapid succession.

It starts out innocent enough, but soon the vivid descriptions of the wild situations that take place draw you into the book. Even though some of the events happening would make any normal man wish for death. However Poe does a good job balancing the dramatic storytelling without overdoing it.

Adventure, horror, and fantasy as only Poe could conjure them
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").