SOURCE: “Poe's Reading of Myth: The White Vision of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 57-74.

In the following essay, Peirce and Rose explore Poe's use of Celtic mythology in Pym, finding that it transforms the voyage narrative into a “revelation of symbolic vision.”

Toward its close, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym seems to suffer a sea change. In its early chapters, the work appears a straight, factually oriented account. However, as the novel progresses toward the South Pole and the conclusion, Pym seems to many readers to take on redemptive or apocalyptic imagery. Indeed, it has a strange mythic quality all its own—changing from a gripping sea yarn to a revelation of symbolic vision.

Myth in literature is characterized as either having unconsciously survived or being consciously revived.¹ This essay is not concerned, however, with...