“The Garb of Fiction” : Edgar Allan Poe's Notes for the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)

Abstract

In his elusive and eccentric 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe presents a sensation first-person account of his fictional title-character’s experiences of cannibalism, mutiny and shipwreck as a stowaway on the South Seas. He adds a series of footnotes and an extensive endnote that point out Pym’s factual errors and lack of documentary evidence. In the “Preliminary Notice at the beginning of the novel, Poe has the fictional character Pym admit that the real-life Poe is the author of the earlier sections, even claiming that Poe had them serialized in the periodical The Southern Literary Messenger “under the garb of fiction”.1 In this article, I argue that, in spite of their ostensibly marginal position, the notes Poe creates for Pym help us better to understand Poe’s play with fact and fiction throughout his writing. Poe uses these annotations to achieve an effect of ludic anticlimax, in which the flaws in his plot and characterization accrete so as to disintegrate the narrative the moment before its expected culmination. Poe thereby exploits the footnote’s capacity to bring exuberant reverie into collision with plain information, and to traverse the boundary between fact and fiction, ripping away “the garb of fiction” to reveal the intricacy of his fabrication.