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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Order, Disorder, and Human Nature
Adventure, Misadventure, and Discovery
Science and Mystery
Racial Anxiety in America
Summary
Analysis
Arthur Gordon Pym explains that he recently returned to the United States after a series of extraordinary adventures. When he told people about them, it caused a great stir in Richmond society. He hesitated to publish his story, however, for fear that he would not be believed. The writer Edgar Allan Poe continued to encourage Pym, eventually convincing him to allow Poe to ghostwrite part of his story and publish it as fiction. These first few chapters were so popular that Pym was inspired to finish the rest of the narrative himself. Now, Pym addresses his audience, making clear to his readers that this is indeed the true story of his experiences at sea.
In the preface, the novel’s real author, Edgar Allan Poe, turns himself into a character in order to make the protagonist and narrator, Arthur Gordon Pym, seem more real. Pym presents himself as a real person recounting the true story of his adventures, a story which the fiction author Edgar Allan Poe merely helped him to publish. The fact that the first few chapters were published separately under Poe’s name is explained as the result of Poe ghostwriting some of Pym’s story, which inspired Pym to finish writing it himself.
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