Edgar Allan Poe’s The (Unnatural): Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

This essay reads Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym as a work of unnatural narrative fiction by examining a number of antirealistic scenarios—physically, logically, and humanly impossible events—that exist alongside the novel’s otherwise realistic narrative world. I argue that Pym’s unnaturalism expands the limits and possibilities of the narrative rather than shrinking them, while at the same time its impossible texts, intelligences, and persons strain the abilities of human cognizance. The contradictory racial descriptions of Dirk Peters are interpreted as an unnatural transformation physically actualized in the narrative world, which distinguishes Pym’s position as an unnatural narrative produced amid the racial epistemologies of nineteenth-century America.