The narrator’s final entry in “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” is full of vivid imagery and situational irony:
Oh, horror upon horror!—the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny! The circles rapidly grow small—we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool—and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering—oh God! and—going down!
The claustrophobic visual imagery conjured by the narrator’s description of the ice and the storm mirrors his emotional and mental claustrophobia as he nears his tragic demise. The frantic, violent movements of nature serve as representations of the narrator’s own internal turmoil. There is a degree of situational irony in the fact that the narrator is writing about his terror with such lush and vivid prose right up until the very end of his last living moments. Because of this over-the-top and desperate, somewhat unrealistic act of recording in the story, some scholars have even posited that “Manuscript in a Bottle” is a parody of the nautical fiction genre.
