Text: Roger Forclaz (trans. Gerald Bello), “A Voyage to the Frontiers of the Unknown: Edgar Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,” Studies in Poe's Pym (1975), pp. 45-55 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 45, unnumbered:]

Despite those imperfections of composition for which one can reproach the author, the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym occupies a central place in the work of Edgar Poe. In approaching the novel, Poe found himself subject to all the rules of the genre, and one must confess that he did not succeed very well in his undertaking. But his attempt at a new genre provided the American storyteller with the opportunity to depict the development of a hero in the course of adventures which put him into contact with 1ife — an opportunity which the short story, because of its limitations, did not provide.

Treating a hero whose adventures initiate him into life, Pym is, to a certain extent, the archetype of a popular genre in American literature: all one need do is to think of Moby-Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, the works of Twain and Hemingway, among others. Thus, Poe's as well as elsewhere — is precursory, but the originality of his writing does not stop there. It is a significant fact that, in Pym as in his other novel, The Journal of Julius Rodman, Poe has dealt with the theme of voyage or, more precisely, of exploration. In Pym, the theme of the sea, a subject already treated in “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and in “A Descent into the Maelström,” is superimposed on this other theme so important to the author of Eureka. Once again, we are launched on the discovery of the unknown par excellence — the sea — which, since The Odyssey, has not ceased to exercise the same fascination. What can better give the feeling of the infinite, give by its moving immensity and by the dangers it presents a testimony “of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world,”(1) as Camus states in The Plague, and, in a word, an image of life? In Moby-Dick, Melville opposed the security of land with the unknown, the sea, and it is the sea which holds the truth, while the voyage on the high seas represents the quest for this truth.

Thus, the sea is called upon to play an important role in literature, and many have considered it a symbol of human destiny. There is no cause to wonder, consequently, that this theme has been germane to a writer like Melville, preoccupied with human instability. For Edgar Poe, whose tragic vision centers on the solitude of the individual, the sea was an ideal stage, and in Pym it plays the most important role. This work would occupy a significant place among sea stories [page 46:] were it only by virtue of being a precursor of Moby-Dick. It owes its place to the air of authenticity, of veracity which pervades it even in the midst of the most improbable fantastic elements. As Melville will later do to a much more extended degree in Moby-Dick, Poe gives an appearance of truth to Pym by the frequent digressions of a scientific nature. However, this pretended fidelity to reality is only a pretext. Poe merely assumes an air of authority to make us more readily accept the improbabilities surrounding the work. As the Jane Guy, which is supposedly concerned with a seal hunt and other business in the South Seas, abandons its original intentions and in consequently makes exploration its first goal, Poe separates us from the entire known world by ca leaving the terrain of scientific exactness in order to give free rein to his imagination. But the only way he could accredit his phantasmagoria was to equip his book with a solid base in reality. He accomplished this by means of digressions which interrupt his narrative. Taking as the subject of his book the austral exploration, a subject in vogue during the era, Poe makes a historical account of this genre of expeditions and, moreover, informs us of certain details of navigation, of various animals, and of the lands alighted upon in the course of the journey. He makes artful use to of this method when the Jane Guy penetrates into the still unexplored regions situated beyond the polar circle. Chapters XIV to XVI are principally documentary in character; this style facilitates the passage from the known to the unknown and renders the transition nearly imperceptible. Likewise, the author turns to a digression on the biche de mer directly preceding the cataclysm be on the island, Tsalal.

Let us add the precautions taken by Poe to attenuate the resistance of the reader to accept the recounted tales: he pretends to despair for fear that he may not obtain the credence of his reader for the unlikely events he is about to relate. He does this with great competency, as one pe notices in the introductory note ostensibly written by Pym. One must confess that Poe has done much to confer to his book the credibility which he admired in Defoe. Moreover, certain readers believed that the book was indeed the narrative of actual adventures.

Admittedly, the work needed the author's intervention, for the narrative takes us beyond the limits of credibility. At the beginning of the adventures, we are still in the domain of the probable, if not of commonplace reality, even though the adventures seem somewhat far-fetched in character.

Arthur Gordon Pym, the hero, slips on board a ship embarking on a whale hunt. His stay as a stowaway in the hold of the Grampus already contains an extraordinary element, and the remarkable nature of the opening chapters is intended to hold our attention. The plot soon thickens: a mu-tiny takes place and Pym's stay in the hold of the ship is unexpectedly prolonged. After his re-Tease, the mutineers are in turn overthrown and exterminated by Peters and the two friends (since Pym is accompanied by Augustus Barnard, his alter ego) who remain the sole masters of the ship, or [page 47:] rather of the wreck. From that moment on, we are led, as it were, to the primitive state in the company of heroes who find themselves in the throes of the worst possible straits: hunger and thirst, exhaustion, misery, terror, and despair. They are forced to struggle without respite for their lives, and this state of balance between life and death becomes a central conflict in the work. In these exceptional circumstances, the law of the jungle prevails: the instinct of preservation reigns supreme; and, at this point where the life of the individual is in danger, having regard for one's fellowmen is quite out of the question. Eventually, the castaways indulge in cannibalism, and their friendship gives way to intense and diabolical hatred.

Before moving to the supernatural, Poe's book truly exposes what is the worst in man and in nature: man constantly struggles with his fellow men and against hostile and unchained natural elements. We witness the triumph of the strong over the weak, the power of cunning, and the reaction of all established authority which results in disorder and anarchy.

The voyage to the South Pole represents, on another level, a journey into time, a regression se toward man's primitive state and toward the natural state of the world; in fact, we reach a territory essentially different from any until then visited by civilized man and where extremely primitive beings exist: the island, Tsalal.

This drama of blood and death is, if one can integrate it into Poe's works, a kind of link between the analytical and the fantastic tales. It is connected to the first by an element of an impelling curiosity to discover the secrets of the universe — a discovery which results in the revelation of the fundamental Unity of the world; but, at the same time, this curiosity draws the hero into a series of catastrophes; and, since it leads to destruction, it is a form of perverseness, as is testified in the following passage from “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a tale which bears more than one resemblance to Pym: “It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”(2)

In Pym, we meet again something which is central in Poe: the impulse of perverseness, this tendency which leads man to self-destruction, and Pym presents an evident kinship with the tales which made Poe famous. Indeed, With such intensity in the fantastic, the atmosphere of Pym is eminently Poesque: shipwreck, misery, mutiny, alcohol, massacre, imprisonment, solitude, despair, and death. From the outset, a stale odor of catastrophe hovers over the work, but the series of A horrors is not very successful from an artistic point of view. The book lacks unity, and it remains but an amalgam of disparate episodes. Furthermore, because of the imbalance resulting from the movement from the point of actual departure to the most unbridled of the fantastic elements and to the supernatural, as well as the exceedingly disconcerting conclusion, one must admit that Poe's novel, from an artistic point of view, suffers from rather serious flaws. Let us, however, or acknowledge that, even when the author's imagination gets the better of scientific accuracy, [page 48:] the air of authenticity is maintained; and that was enough to cause Jules Verne to become interested in the work sixty years later and to create a sequel in The Sphinx of the Ice Fields, the while nevertheless rejecting Poe's great extravagances for the sake of keeping within a scientific domain.

But for Poe the possibility of giving free rein to his imagination counted more than scientific exactness; and, when the Jane Guy arrives at Tsalal, the symbolic element assumes a preponderant role. We have explanations on this subject in the postscript where the three principal themes of the book are clarified: exploration, blackness, and whiteness. We have already had the WO! opportunity to discuss the value of exploration for Poe who, if he pretends to serve in the interests of science, does not so much pursue a goal of this nature, but instead a cosmological and ontological goal, at the end of which resides “some never-to-be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.”

It is in this perspective that one should view the expedition of Pym on board the Grampus, then on board the Jane Guy. For, is the voyage not an image of human destiny? The voyage is a symbol of man's struggle against the elements and at the same time an effort to establish a relationship between man and nature. In effect, the sea, in Poe's narrative, is an element of chaos and un disaster.

However, it is at the end of the book, as we have mentioned, that the symbolism is particularly marked. We meet, in the last two stages of the voyage — the island of Tsalal and the Pole-a double antithesis: first, the antithesis of land and sea, then the antithesis of black and white. If in Melville land symbolizes calm, peace, and serenity, it represents in Poe new dangers to for the heroes, who falsely believe they have found on land a protection against the perils of the sea. In approaching Tsalal, the seamen do not delay in establishing contact with the natives; and, after a period in which they create a good rapport with them, they find themselves annihilated by a landslide brought on by the savages and from which only two of them — Pym and Peters — escape. Yet, they are prisoners on the island, and only at the expense of great efforts do they er manage to escape. But if they succeed in avoiding burial by the menacing rock, it is only to fall in the abyss of the Pole, and the land and the sea play a complementary role from the perspective of Poe's obsession with death.

Another more fundamental antithesis contrasts the two colors, white and black. Black, a symbol of evil, is the color of the primitive earth on which the Jane Guy alights, and white is considered at the end of the book as sacred. Poe exploits here the mystery and the ambiguity attached to the color white, as Melville, following Poe, did later in Moby-Dick, where we read:

White is associated with the supernatural and is the color of the apparition which welcomes the two survivors at the end of the voyage. It is the only reality which stands at the conclusion of the voyage as a symbol of Unity and the Infinite. To white is joined silence; and, without venturing onto the dangerous terrain of Marie Bonaparte, who sees in the color a figure of the lost mother, one can perhaps view white as representing the inscrutability of God.

The complexity is thus brought back to the fundamental dichotomy of white and black and is reduced at the end of the story to the unity of the color white. As one advances and as the real the world disappears, one moves toward a gradual simplification and a reduction of the complexity to unity. The penultimate stopping-place of the voyage, Tsalal, is marked by the struggle against evil, black being the fundamental color of this “ultimate Thule.” But, at this stage of primitivism, antagonism is succeeded by what is found at the end of the voyage: the absolute, infinity, in other terms, Unity, the source of all life, towards which everything converges, as in Eureka.

Such is the goal of Pym's voyage, of this effort to reach the substance concealed under the appearances of life, a voyage which is finally settled by a negative result, since in a reality ceaselessly subject to change and containing only horror and incoherence, the experience which Pym undergoes is that of man's solitude. For, after all, what matters in the book is the experience 4 and the personality of the hero — if one can call Pym one, because he is more often passive than active and is frequently relegated to the background as a simple chronicler of the voyage.

The hero is, in the first place, the narrator, for, as is typical of Poe's tales, he himself relates his adventures. This procedure suffices to assure him a permanence, a continued presence to keep us interested in him. His position is thus a privileged and strategic one, as is that of the any narrator in a novel or a short story, because the reader feels involved or in complicity with him. The first person narration is, for Poe, a way of establishing an atmosphere of authenticity, of probability. In The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, this technique allows us to share in the hero's agonies during his voyage; but rather often Pym, as we have stated, is simply a chronicler. Nevertheless, Poe has especially discovered in this narrative technique a means of giving credence to all his character, which he has done in the preface with great skill, therefore peremptorily establishing the reality of Pym and of his strange adventures. The writer is introduced by his hero who, on the return from his voyage to the South Pole, found someone who took an interest in his adventures and published two of the episodes in the Southern Literary Messenger “under the garb on of fiction.”(4) The preface thus creates the atmosphere of the book by reversing the normal order of things, by interchanging the respective values of reality and of fiction: the protagonist becomes a real person who presents the writer, and the writer merely serves as the chronicler of the voyage of the first. Such a relationship between the author and his character permits us to see Pym as but a delegate of his creator in the author's imaginary voyage. [page 50:]

Subsequently, the narrator will not cease to express his care to remain faithful to the bow truth, and he even takes the precaution to provide for the future by affirming in Chapter IV that when he gives up all hope of obtaining credence for the improbable events of the last portion of the narrative. But the last misadventure which was reserved for Poe's character by his creator was to fore be disclaimed to a certain degree by the author, who in the appended notes confesses “his disbelef in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narration.”(5)

The narrator, A. G. Pym, tells us his own adventures, and in that telling resides the essential interest of the book. What is the personality of this Poesque hero who gives the story a certain unity, since he is the only constant in it?

Of all the characters in the book, Pym is the only one to live a hidden drama of horror and absurdity; 1ife does not contain for his companions of misfortune the horror which it holds for evil him. That is why his role is privileged, although he is only rarely a true hero. Evidence of his toe heroism is indicated in view of the behavior of the four survivors of the Grampus: Pym is the feel only one to keep his lucidity and to act rationally, whereas his companions “seemed to be brought comp to a species of second childhood, generally simpering in their expressions, with idiotic smiles, and uttering the most absurd platitudes.”(6) Several times he begins to reflect on the horror of the situation; on the whole, he is given to think rather than to act, and his lucidity only serves him to take cognizance of the perils to which he is exposed. Likewise, Pym, contrary to his companions, shows evidence of foresight by consuming, despite his hunger, only a portion of In t his ration of the ham which Peters brought back from the store-room a few days after the scene of cannibalism.

On the other hand, Pym is a typical Poesque hero. In the first place, he is a melancholy man who is drawn to the dark side of life, to “the more terrible moments of suffering and despair”(7) of the life of a seaman. He savors the taste of risk and adventure and feels predestined to an existence of unhappiness; Tike so many other Poesque heroes, he considers himself different from the rest of men. The principle passage in this respect occurs at the beginning of Chapter II, which defines the attraction of the sea for Pym and informs us of the reasons which impel the hero self to undertake his voyage. Possessed with a “somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination,”(8) he has, the as he says, only a limited sympathy for the bright side of the painting:

He sees in these reveries “prophetic glimpses”(10) of an existence to which he feels destined. Nothing can stop him, and the dangers and obstacles which he feels he will encounter only excite his “wanderlust.” This passion for danger is a form of perverseness. In yielding to the call of In| the unknown, Pym heads toward his ruin. He is responsible for the captain's decision to turn the [page 51:] bow of the Jane Guy to the south, or, more precisely, he prevents his leader from turning back at when the first difficulties arise. Thus, the responsibility for the adventure rests on Pym. From the moment that it becomes a matter of exploration, he abandons his passivity and returns to the to foreground; at the announcement of the polar expedition, he experiences an intense interest and proves impatient at the least delay which unexpectedly occurs in the course of the journey. Like Julius Rodman, the hero of Poe's other novel, Pym is filled with the love of the unknown. But curiosity, this constant quest for “the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder,”(11) as Poe writes in “A Descent into the Maelström,” is often fatal to man; and, Pym runs to his ruin.

Besides curiosity, Pym is characterized by obsession — a tendency to do evil for the love of evil, designated by Poe as the “impulse” of “perverseness.” This impulse causes Pym, in the hold, to empty in one gulp a bottle of liquor and then later, at the moment of escaping from Tsalal, to feel the allurement of the abyss while descending the cliff. Poe's account of this allurement is comparable with his description in “The Imp of the Perverse,” wherein the author writes:

In the narrative, Pym says:

Another obsession is claustrophobia or fear of premature burial. Twice, the hero finds himself isolated and nearly cut off from the world of the living — the first time during his stay in, as, the hold of the Grampus a stay which soon results in imprisonment, the second on Tsalal during the landslide brought on by the savages. Thus, he gives free rein to the terror which takes hold of him, and the horror of being buried alive is expressed in terms very similar to those employed in “The Premature Burial.” In the tale, the narrator speaks of

In Pym we read: [page 52:]

Inclined to the tragic, Pym's imagination is typical of that of Poe's other heroes: Pym 1ives the same agonies, lapses into the same paroxysms, the same alternations of joy and dread. He is capable of intense excitement as well as profound despair; he is prey to the paralyzing terror or to the feverish agitation characteristic of the states of extreme danger; but, he can also feel “a giddy and overpowering sense of deliverance and reanimation.”(16) Examples taken from “the first chapter will suffice to give a tonality of the whole. From the perspective of the nocturnal boat party, Pym feels “a thrill of the greatest excitement and pleasure.”(17) Then, the behavior of his friend, Augustus, fills him with “an indescribable feeling of dread” which takes him to “the extremity of ... despair”(18) when Augustus collapses to the bottom of the boat. The arrival of the whaling-ship plunges him into an “intense agony of terror (19) before he faints near his companion who has “at no time experienced so excruciating a sense of dismay”(20) at discovering the extent of his intoxication.

Even in the worst dangers, our hero maintains his lucidity. Although lucid, Pym nevertheless finds himself “oppressed with a multitude of gloomy feelings;”(21) he experiences sensations “of extreme horror and dismay;”(22) and he gives way to thoughts of “the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment”(23) The word “blood” chills him with terror and fills him with undefinable horror: “And ‘blood,’ too, that word of all words — so rife at all times with mystery, suffering, and terror. ...”(24)

The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym provides universal interest. Pym's adventures are those of an adolescent whose voyage initiates him into life. From this point of view, the novel approaches the “Bildungsroman.” To fulfill his aspirations, the hero breaks with his environment and with his past and takes to the sea. In revolt against society, he becomes an outlaw; and this act of rejection of all that is established precipitates the appearance of the two fundamental themes of the book: revolt and deception. Beginning with deception (and, the author reminds us in the passage, “School-boys, however, can accomplish wonders in the way of deception”(25)) Pym's voyage ends with the revelation that, ultimately, everything is but a deception or an illusion. Pym's drama is one of solitude — a drama which achieves its culminating point in the scene dealing with cannibalism. But Pym has companions in his adventures — first Augustus, who stimulates his wanderlust, then Peters, who brings him aid, which he needs many a time to get out of a difficulty.

Solitude becomes the essential reality, for everything is revealed as an illusion; reality never conforms to appearances, as the episode of the ghost ship and the treason of the savages proves. The self is thus the fundamental element, and the book is built on the perspective of solipsism in an attempt to establish a connection between the individual and the world. In the end, everything turns to anarchy and chaos, and what stands alone is the Unity of the color white. [page 53:] The protagonist perceives all the horror of life and, contrary to an Ishmael who does not stop thinking and who finds himself engaged in the quest for truth, Pym's self merely takes cognizance of the external drama, in accordance with the method of exteriorization of which Poe was fond. Pym's universe is limited to sensation and to the level of consciousness. A psychological drama is played, a drama made of different stages of terror and where the self always affirms its supremacy over reality, having at times an influence over it, as when Pym, feeling drawn to the void, struggles not to think in order to ward off the horror of the fall, even if he will ultimately fall. Facing a moving and illusory reality, the self is thus the sole constant in the book, and solitude is the basic condition of man, who is in perpetual conflict with the universe.

Such is the quest for the absolute in which Pym is engaged; but, begun in the actual, his voyage terminates in nirvana. The book makes us a witness to his progressive depersonalization. His adventure is similar to that of another outlaw, Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, an orphan without home, fascinated by the unknown and attracted to the sea. Both are rivals of Robinson Crusoe, and both embark on a long voyage which eventually initiates them to life. Their experience is a tragic one — that of solitude. In a struggle against the appearances of life, they strive to reach true reality. This impulse leads them into a series of catastrophes. Above all, their undertaking is that of the author who assigns his character to an imaginary voyage in pursuit of a goal dear to the author: to attain the truth and to strive against evil. However, both writers achieve their similar ends differently.

In effect, the interest of the narrative rests to a great extent on the autobiographical portions lodged within it. The “somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination”(26) and the melancholy temperament of the hero are traits of the author himself, and the work allows us to take part in Poe's own psychological drama by reflecting the anguish which the author himself experienced. Pym inherits his curiosity from his creator — a curiosity which leads him to take an interest in the transitional stages between life and death. He also shares with Poe the solitude which moved the writer to say in a letter to John Allan dated 3 January 1831: “It was my crime to have no one on earth who cared for me or loved me.”(27)

Besides these resemblances of character, one finds in Pym certain analogies to actual facts from the author's life. If one can evoke apropos of the escapade on board the Ariel the memory of the boat parties of the adolescent Poe in the company of his friend, Ebenezer Burling, one can find in the character, Augustus — a sort of big brother to Pym — the fascination exercised on Poe by the stories of his elder brother, Henry Poe, and his influence on Edgar, two years his junior, as Pym is to Augustus. Augustus initiates Pym to the sea by recounting his adventures to him, and his tales, like those of Henry Poe, are strongly marked by exaggeration. Their intimacy is such that it produces, as the author says, “a partial interchange of character.(28) [page 54:]

What is true of Augustus is also true of Pym's familial milieu, which recalls the comfortable circumstances of the Allan family. Besides the evident Poesque provenance of the hero's birthplace, Edgarton, one should remark that his father is a businessman, and his grandfather's opposition to his adventurous projects cannot but recall the authoritarian temperament of John Allan and his resistance to Edgar's attempted emancipation from Allan's custody. Because of his bourgeois spirit and his love of money, Pym's grandfather seems to have been modeled after John Allan, and it is significant that he is disclaimed by his grandson.

Moreover, it is striking that Pym's departure coincides with Poe's leaving Richmond in 1827 and breaking all ties with John Allan in order to begin his literary career. Poe's goal — the pursuit of the inaccessible — is evident in Pym's undertaking, which symbolizes the author's literary career and which is confirmed by the fact that at the moment of his death Poe is said to have called several times the name of the American explorer, Jeremiah N. Reynolds, whose Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition inspired Pym. Thus, Poe likened his undertaking to that of Reynolds.

The close ties between the author and his character are further strengthened by the rhythmic similitude of the two names, compounds of the same number of syllables: Arthur Gordon Pym — Edgar Allan Poe, and the preface specifies, as we have seen, the relationship between Pym and his creator. For all these reasons, then, it should not be considered temerarious to treat Pym as a substitute for the writer in this voyage to the frontiers of the unknown.

Thus, by the synthesis of the fantastic tales and the logical tales, by the condensation of the typical Poesque themes: perverseness, phobia of premature burial, cryptography, exploration, alcohol, famine, revolt, and death — by the portrayal of the evolution of a character in the course of adventures which initiate him to life — by the relationship between Pym and his creator, one can with good cause conclude that the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym occupies a central place in the work of Edgar Poe. Moreover, one can only be well pleased that this work has finally been accorded the appreciation which it merits.

Hahnemann Medical College

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

[page 55:]

Notes

* This essay originally appeared at “Un Voyage Aux Frontiéres de L’Inconnu: Les Adventures d’A. G. Pym, d’Edgar Poe,” in Etudes de Lettres, 7 (Jan. 1964), 46-58. I acknowledge here my gratitude to EdL and to Dr. Forclaz for permission to translate and publish this essay. With Dr. Forclaz's concurrence, I have on occasion translated freely instead of literally in the interest of concision, which in no way alters the meaning of the original French. For the most part, however, the translation remains faithful to the French text. I have also followed Dr. Forclaz's suggestions concerning changes that align the essay more neatly with critical views of Pym that have developed since his work first appeared. For advice I thank Professor Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV, Hahnemann Medical College.

All textual citations are to The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Random House, 1938). My quotations follow the lead of Dr. Forclaz, who quotes from Adventures d’A. G. Pym, translated by Baudelaire (Livre de Poche).

1 Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 37.

2 Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 125.

3 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Morton, 1976), p. 188.

4 Poe, Complete Tales and Poems, p. 748.

5 Complete Tales, p. 882.

6 Complete Tales, p. 815.

7 Complete Tales, p. 757.

8 Complete Tales, p. 757.

9 Complete Tales, p. 757.

10 Complete Tales, p. 757.

11 Complete Tales, p. 129.

12 Complete Tales, p. 282; I have added this citation to the essay.

13 Complete Tales, p. 875.

14 Complete Tales, p. 263; I have included this citation.

15 Complete Tales, pp. 861-852.

16 Complete Tales, p. 764.

17 Complete Tales, p. 757.

18 Complete Tales, p. 752.

19 Complete Tales, p. 753.

20 Complete Tales, p. 756.

21 Complete Tales, p. 762

22 Complete Tales, p. 766.

23 Complete Tales, p. 766.

24 Complete Tales, p. 770.

25 Complete Tales, p. 756.

26 Complete Tales, p. 757.

27 The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (New York: Gordian Press, 1966), I, p. 41.

28 Complete Tales, p. 757.