From the beginning of this novel, if you'd like to even call it that, I recognized that there would be issues regarding interpretation and reliability on the narrator, Arthur Gordon Pym. Arguably the tale follows the cliché agenda of sea voyagers; ship wreck, mutiny, savage natives and such, but the mere idea that Pym and Poe try to pass the novel off as an autobiography is absurd. The issues mainly rely in how much we can trust Pym as he retells his tale, even though he is dead. Personally I feel deceived in initially believing that this quest was fact while in truth it was merely a descriptive imagination I did not enjoy. Half the time I was reading the book, I literally had my mouth open in shock that certain events or meals happened for which Pym, Peters, and Augustus felt no remorse.
Poe’s great depth into how a corpse ship would look, or how it would feel in picking a mate to eat after starving for a week furthered the acknowledgment that his imagination was not a place one would want to spend a lot of time in. Because his life was so filled with death and abandonment it would seem plausible that his books and creativity could be an escape, but ultimately they were a way in which to funnel his cruel and gruesome feelings into something everyone could share, regrettably. I personally hated the fact that Augustus died. He was the only character I felt I could trust in the entire book. The rest remained deceitful in every single action. Peters was once the leader of a mutiny, Pym is half drunk or crazy of which his vivid and unlikely imagination was born. And the remaining characters such as the natives of Tsalala and the smiling face on the corpse boat that passes by prove this fact; there are two faces to every character, none of which seemed trustworthy. Thus, I believe that Poe could have possibly been making a statement regarding all those who did not fulfill his life, but he had hoped could have done so. Certain people may seem as if they are helpful or trustworthy or lifesavers, but in fact they have another side to show, such as a murderer, a mutineer, or a dead face with an eerie smile.
Poe sets himself up for questioning the validity of both the narrators and the novel as a whole from the beginning of the preface. By starting the novel with statements indicating that outsiders had a difficult time believing the forthcoming tale, it creates a sense of hesitance within the reader. I agree that his imagination does continue to go wild especially when he begins to give dates to the latter parts of the journey. After such a long period of time has passed, I find it highly unlikely that accurate dates could have been kept, and the narrator even acknowledges this on pg 112 in the novel, which seems partly self-contradicting. The gruesome traits in the novel could be interpreted as Poe’s coping mechanism to deal with the tragedies and negative aspects of all the appalling things he witnessed in his lifetime.
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