The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

Pym stows away aboard the whaler Grampus with his friend Augustus, survives a bloody mutiny by hiding in the hold, then a countermutiny, then a shipwreck that leaves the hull capsized and the handful of survivors starving on its overturned keel until they draw lots and kill and eat the sailor Parker, an episode Poe narrates with a queasy, procedural calm that scandalized his contemporaries more than any of the novel's later violence. Poe was writing for money and serializing as he went, and the book's lurching structure, boy's-adventure chapters bolted to increasingly hallucinatory ones, shows the seams of that method even as it builds toward something stranger than the survival narrative it started as.

Rescued and carried south aboard the Jane Guy, Pym reaches the island of Tsalal, whose black-toothed, black-skinned inhabitants fear anything white and turn out to be luring the ship's crew into a staged landslide massacre; Pym and the half-Indian sailor Dirk Peters escape by canoe with a captive native, Nu-Nu, drifting into a warmer, milkier sea where fine white ash begins falling from the sky and a towering, shrouded white figure rises directly ahead as the account breaks off. The racial imagery, Blackness coded as danger and deception on Tsalal, an overwhelming whiteness waiting at the pole, has made the ending one of the most argued-over passages in Poe, most influentially by Toni Morrison, who reads it as American racial anxiety pushed all the way to cosmology.

Morrison's reading in Playing in the Dark treats the novel's closing whiteout, ash, mist, a colossal white shape, as the logical endpoint of the black-white terror Poe has been building since Tsalal, American racial dread translated wholesale into a landscape at the bottom of the world where it no longer needs a human antagonist to carry it. Read that way, the unfinished ending isn't a failure of nerve so much as an image with nowhere further to go: Poe has pushed the country's own racial imagination to a literal edge of the map.