I think we can all agree that Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym was one hell of an adventure. That poor kid got more than he bargained for when set off from Nantucket. At times, I was reading and I found that I wasn’t quite sure what kind of journey Arthur was going on. I know that all journeys are really about the protagonist discovering who they are but when it came to Arthur, I wasn’t sure if he was out there sailing the open waters because it was a coming-of-age journey or a spiritual journey or…

Thanks to Poe’s ambiguous white-figured ending, I guess I’ll never really know what the point of Arthur’s adventure was. And, if I’m being honest, I’m kind of ok with that. This just means I can take some liberties in my close reading and think whatever I want. For me, the novel was about civility; within the novel itself, Poe uses black and white race relations to demonstrate this. If I recall, I remember reading that Poe, as a pretty stereotypical 19^th century white man, was a white supremacist. As a result, the novel falls into a pretty traditional pattern: the black people in the novel are blood-thirsty, savage, untrustworthy and uncivilized while the white people are the exact opposite. While I was reading, I was a little miffed when I got to Poe’s description of the Tsalalian natives. He spent a great deal of time really distancing Arthur from the ferocious black savages. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes and think that the most morbid and grotesque scenes in the novel revolved around the actions of Arthur and his band of white (or in the case of Peters, white-ish) sailors. They were the ones after all who, you know, ate each other. They were also the ones who impersonated a dead body and killed the cook and his crew. While Arthur’s actions were all done in the name of survival, I couldn’t help but think that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

It wasn’t until a few days ago that I realized my line of thinking had been skewed. I couldn’t fit my breakdown-of-civility reading of the novel into the ending that way I wanted it to. I realized that I had been thinking of the novel as having a typical arc- that the novel started out all white, polite and civilized and ended all dark, savage and morbid. Now I’ve come to realize that this novel is almost cyclical and relies on a series of re-births to bring the story full circle.

The novel begins with white, middle-class, respectable friends Arthur and Augustus. Together, the two of them represent the civilized world. It is Augustus who introduced Arthur to the sea and the promise of adventure that it holds. I kind of thought of Augustus as being the personification of the spirit of adventure; he becomes Arthur’s guide and gets him onto the ship. While on the ship he becomes trapped in his tiny little hole. Due a series of unfortunate circumstances, he remains there for several days with no food or water. Ultimately, he is freed thanks to Augustus. If we fast-forward a few chapters, we have Augustus, Peters, Parker and Arthur as the lone survivors on a broken ship. It is here that I realized that Augustus inadvertently passed the reins to Peters, making him Arthur’s new guide. In fact, the only reason Augustus was ever able to free Arthur from the ship was through Peter’s kindness.

Ultimately Augustus proves pretty useless as a guide, from the moment the ship sets sail the spirit of adventure proves to be a promising and fanciful facade. The reality is that adventure is ugly. The reality of adventure takes the form of Dirk Peters who looks an awful lot like an African-American but technically isn’t. I realized in retrospect that if Peters had actually been black, there would have been no hope for Arthur’s final re-birth and reentrance into whiteness. Poe even describes Peters as being ugly and disproportional. It is Peters who remains by Arthur’s side when their adventure goes from bad to worse. It is Peter’s who saves his life time and time again. As Arthur grows more dependent on his new friend and guide, his old friend and guide slowly dies. He dies from an arm wound he received when he was unable to properly defend himself in a real life and death situation.

Things become tricky for Arthur when he and Peters are rescued by the crew of the Jane Guy. Now these characters find themselves back in a structured, white man’s environment. However, they quickly find the island and Tsalal and Poe plunges his readers back into uncivilized, do-or-die situation. Once again it is Peters who swoops in and saves Arthur from the ferocious and scary black natives. It is important to note that Peters pulls Arthur out of the ground. This is the second time in the novel that Arthur has been entombed. The first time, in the hold in the ship, resulted in a new, more savage adventure then Arthur could have ever imagined. Much like the freeing from the first entombment, I realize now, that this freeing will mark the beginning of the end of Arthur’s relationship with his guide. First it was Augustus to Peters and now I think that this time Arthur transitions from Peters to the mysterious white figure at the end of the novel. Like with Augustus, this transferring of the guide is not immediate and happens slowly over the course of chapters.

What exactly happens to Arthur when they meet the white figure? I don’t really have a clue. I do think however, that because the figure is white, Arthur is probably returning to a more structured, white, civil situation. Maybe the figure is death itself. Maybe it’s a race of semi-civilized “snow monkeys” like in Mat Johnson’s novel Pym. Maybe it is just another wild chapter in Arthur’s never-ending adventure. Thanks to the notes in the novel, the reader knows for a fact that ultimately, Arthur will leave Peters behind. The reader knows that white civility will trump Arthur’s experiences at sea because the figure at the end literally scares poor Nu-Nu to death. I am not necessarily saying that Arthur eventually returned home and shrug off his experiences at sea (personally, I would find this to be the most unbelievable of endings), I am saying that in my opinion, the meeting of the white figure is leading Arthur to a whiter and therefore better and less-savage place.

Photo Credit: http://trattoglia.deviantart.com/art/Arthur-Gordon-Pyms-Finale-164613005