The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Poe uses the relationship between light and dark throughout the novel to develop the theme of Appearance Versus Reality. While the light/dark dynamic is sometimes used literally, it more frequently carries symbolic weight, representing a struggle between good (life) and evil (death). However, the vagueness of many of Pym’s scenes causes even this fairly straightforward symbolic correspondence to become somewhat confusing, particularly toward the end of the novel.

In the first half of the text, darkness conveys or represents fear in a number of scenes: when Pym is trapped in the hold of the Grampus, for example, he describes the space as “so intensely dark that I could not see my hand, however close I would hold it to my face” (23). Additionally, the terrifying Dutch ship—a veritable embodiment of death—is painted black (68). On both of these occasions, a dark object or location is directly associated with terror or anxiety and amplifies the textual atmosphere of fear. However, from the moment the Jane Guy crosses the Antarctic Circle, light and dark are simultaneously more important and less readable as symbols. The crew stumbles upon mysterious, frightening animal carcasses that are almost entirely white, reversing the association of light with life and, instead, aligning it with death. The island of Tsalal is described largely in terms of darkness, with the sea around it being “an extraordinarily dark color,” the local people wearing skins of “an unknown black animal” and carrying clubs of a “dark” wood, and the village being full of domesticated black albatrosses (113, 119). Given their eventual betrayal of the Jane Guy crew, the villagers’ depiction as dark, evil figures living in a sinister place is consistent with the plot. However, Pym’s time spent on Tsalal also marks a personal triumph for him: he is obsessed with exploring and documenting a previously unknown—to the US and Europe, at least—region near the South Pole, which he is able to do because of the island’s existence.

Light and dark become even more symbolically intermingled after Pym and Peters escape: They sail into “milky” waters, above which hang a “light gray” vapor and into which falls a strange “white powder” (149, 150). However, even as they move closer to the white “cataract,” the darkness around them increases. It is “relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain” before them (151). The shrouded figure whose skin is “the perfect whiteness of the snow” is never identified or explained, but its presence seems to have killed Nu-Nu (151). Pym and Peters have fled a place where darkness maintains a traditional association with evil—in fact, some critics believe Tsalal represents the Christian hell—and ended up in a place where white also symbolizes death. Thus, the light/dark dynamic throughout Pym is ultimately unstable and unpredictable, but it is always associated in some way with the dynamic between life and death.