Comment on Poe & Arthur Gordon Pym!

Upon finishing this novel, I couldn’t help but conclude that Poe seems to write a majority of his material for no other reason than the shock value of it. In an effort to keep his readers interested amidst the long-winded descriptions, he throws in sentences such as, “In going over the bows, his foot slipped, and he fell between two cakes of ice, never rising again” (p 109). This nonchalant attitude towards death (evident also in the unceremonious death and disposal of his good friend Augustus) is something I find very interesting in Poe’s writing. He is similarly casual about human life in his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” when he murders a man for no apparent reason. Poe also seems to have a talent for capturing the feeling of utter hopelessness and despair. On page 127, he writes about “the blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of lungs…to carry into the human heart a degree of appalling awe and horror not to be tolerated.”
Poe’s ability to craft a story which so well reflects the true inner feelings humans experience could be the reason why some people thought this novel was a work of non-fiction (the note at the end about the loss of a few final chapters was a nice touch), but I believe that throughout the novel Poe hints at the falsity of it. Aside from the outrageous creatures and situations, Poe continually mentions that he is merely relating his perceptions of this supposed journey. The book reminded me somewhat of Gulliver’s Travels in the sense that it was a detailed description of an implausible voyage. Like Gulliver’s Travels called attention to current issues of the times, Poe seems to try to do the same in this pieced-together novel which evokes images of the middle passage and echoes the feelings of desperation and suffering that slaves must have felt.