Review

Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) is one of the most legendary enigmas of literary history. Arguably, what is so intriguing about it is that it has the superficial appearance of a puzzle that can be solved, sending readers along ever more abstruse and obscure interpretive paths—while aggregate experience tells us otherwise. The literary qualities of the work as a whole can be debated, with its long, rambling and seemingly pointless filler passages and its internal logical and narrative inconsistencies. I think, however, together with other Poe scholars, that for all its inherent flaws the ending is an eminently crafted machinery to present the appearance of truth, a literary puzzle devised to puzzle, not to be solved. In this sense it is a purely open-ended text that creates a field of gravity of its own, pulling readers into it. As John Carlos Rowe describes it, Poe's novel is...