46 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Allan PoeThe Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1838A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
The Jane Guy sailed out of Liverpool and is bound for the South Pacific. Pym describes her captain, also named Guy, as urbane and experienced but ultimately lacking in energy. While the rest of the sailors are also capable seamen, the crew is smaller than a ship of her size typically requires. They treat Pym and Parker with great kindness, and the two soon recover entirely from their ordeal at sea.
Over the course of several weeks, the Jane Guy sails around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Southern Indian Ocean. They arrive at Kerguelen’s Land, a chain of islands, where they anchor. Pym provides a detailed history of European and American voyages into the area, going back as far as 1772. He goes on to describe the animal and plant life on the islands, focusing in particular on the symbiotic relationship between the albatross and the penguin communities that live there. The Jane Guy stays in Kerguelen’s Land for three weeks, hunting seals and exploring the islands.
Chapter 15 Summary
Upon setting sail, the Jane Guy heads toward the remote islands of Tristan d’Acunha. Pym provides another detailed history of the exploration of these islands, highlighting the number of times various explorers and countries made claims to them. They then begin searching for a chain of islands called the Auroras, “respecting whose existence a great diversity of opinion has existed” (102). According to Pym, Spanish navigators confirmed the presence of the islands, but when a British naval captain visited the same coordinates, no islands were there. The Jane Guy cannot find the islands.
Chapter 16 Summary
Rather than sailing up the Patagonian coast as originally intended, the Jane Guy turns south and sails toward the pole. Pym again describes, at considerable length, the history of South Pole exploration, which he points out is a necessity for any reader unfamiliar with these voyages. He focuses on the journeys of Captain Cook, J. N. Reynolds, Captain James Weddell, Captain Benjamin Smith, and Captain Briscoe, which took place between 1772 and 1832 and resulted in a variety of outcomes. The principal debate in which Captain Guy hopes to intervene is whether there is a continent made of ice and, if so, how large it is. Pym finds himself excited about and interested in this plan.
Chapter 17 Summary
The ship continues on its course, eventually crossing the Antarctic Circle. They lose an American crew member when he slips and falls overboard between two ice floes. One day, they see what appears to be an Arctic bear floating on a sheet of ice. When Pym and Peters attempt to hunt it, it attacks them. Peters eventually kills it, and they consume its meat, noting that it is larger than the Arctic bear and has completely red eyes.
They soon stop at a rocky islet, which Captain Guy names Bennett’s Islet in honor of his business partner. Pym notes that they have now sailed southward eight degrees farther than any previous navigator. Although Captain Guy wants to remain on the islet to replenish their provisions and treat the crew for scurvy, Pym is driven by the desire to solve “the great problem” of an Antarctic continent and insists they keep sailing (111).
Chapter 18 Summary
They leave Bennett’s Islet and continue south, picking up a mysterious animal carcass from another small island. This unidentifiable creature is a small mammal with a ratlike tail and red claws and teeth. The following day, they arrive at a chain of large islands; upon approaching one, they see four canoes on the shore, full of well-armed men who quickly sail out to meet the Jane Guy. Pym describes them as “muscular and brawny,” with “jet black” skin and “thick and long woolly hair” (113). Their chief is a man named Too-wit who, despite the language barrier, eagerly welcomes the visitors to their village, which lies nine miles inland.
Pym and Captain Guy disagree on whether to remain on the island or continue pushing farther south. Pym ultimately convinces the captain that they can stop at the island for provisions on their return voyage but agrees that they should visit the village briefly before departing. He describes the island as “differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men,” noting that even the rocks and water look strange and unfamiliar (116).
Chapter 19 Summary
Pym feels apprehensive about trusting Too-wit. The group arrives at the village, which Pym calls “miserable” in its lack of modern comforts (118). The villagers live mostly in dwellings made of tree branches or in shallow caverns, which they share with a number of domesticated animals, including albatrosses and large hogs. The sailors dine in Too-wit’s hut and pledge their eternal friendship. They then question him in an attempt to discover the island’s chief productions and determine whether they can profit from them. They learn that the biche de mer, a type of sea cucumber, is abundant, and the villagers assure them that they can take as much as they need. Pym feels unsettled by the increased number of villagers now accompanying them.
Chapters 14-19 Analysis
The rescue of Pym and Parker by the Jane Guy marks a significant change in the novel: The narrative focus is no longer on the disaster of the Grampus but is now centered on the exploration of the South Pacific. Pym seems to have forgotten everything that happened before the rescue, never again referencing Augustus, Parker, the Grampus, or Nantucket. His obsession with Antarctic exploration seems to usher in an entirely new narrative, one marked by a progressive vision devoted to discovery. This is one of the shifts that critics often note as an inconsistency in the novel: Pym suddenly becomes so focused on discovering an ice continent at the South Pole that he repeatedly endangers his own life and the lives of those around him. He replaces the trauma of his near-death experience with an obsessive quest for exploration and conquest, even objecting to allowing the crew to stop to rest and attend to their health. Despite his recent suffering, he is not driven by empathy or concern for others, even for those who rescued him. This echoes the frenzied pace of US and European exploration as a race to lay claim to and exploit other lands and their inhabitants.
This portion of the novel also marks the first major inclusion of outside sources into the narrative. Poe begins actively incorporating outside materials into the text; he uses details from scientific and historical accounts of the South Pacific, often without crediting his sources. This shift sustains the questions of the fragility of narrative structures that began to emerge in the Preface, as it incorporates multiple texts and writers without acknowledgment or attribution. It also provides a reminder of the fact that this novel was part of an evolving literary and cultural conversation about the role of European and American explorers in the Global South. When Pym references explorers who came before the Jane Guy, he locates himself in the middle of a population of white expeditioners who continually ventured into and laid claim to territories that were previously unexplored by white people.
Finally, the novel’s perspectives on non-white, non-European people crystallize in this section. Pym uses words like “savages” and “barbarians” to describe the population of Tsalal, and he repeatedly emphasizes the otherness of the island: “At every step we took inland the conviction forced itself upon us that we were in a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men” (115). Pym believes Tsalal is the strangest, most alien place any white man ever visited, and his lack of trust in Too-wit and the rest of the villagers reflects this belief. The terms he uses to describe this encounter reflect the discourse on “civilization” versus “savagery,” in which white Western cultures were viewed as restrained, educated, and moral, in contrast to the depiction of non-white, rural people as animalistic, untamed, and driven by instincts. The rhetoric that follows in the rest of the novel highlights more starkly the disjunction between the experience of a white person and that of a person of color during this period. Pym emphasizes the duplicitous, violent nature of the villagers but never considers that their actions are driven by the need to protect themselves and their land from exploitation by invaders like him. This also reflects the presumption that the Global North has the right to appropriate the Global South.
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