The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, is Edgar Allan Poe's only completed novel. A story of Antarctic exploration, Arthur Gordon Pym is considered a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.
The novel tells the story of Arthur Gordon Pym, a young man whose stowing away on a whaler ship leads to a series of increasingly bizarre adventures as he travels further and further south, involving storms, mutinies, shipwreck, cannibalism, and a ghost ship. Eventually he and his party come to an island called Tsalal in waters near the South Pole, with a mild climate despite the extreme latitude, where water is viscous and strangely colored. His companions are betrayed by the inhabitants, and he and the only other surviving crew member take refuge in an underground labyrinth with strange carvings. Stealing a boat, Pym journeys even further south, into a milky white ocean. The narrative ends abruptly with the sighting of a gigantic hooded figure appearing in a gap in a mysterious mist.
The phrase "tekeli-li" reoccurs in the novel, first as a phrase of the inhabitants of Tsalal that they shout with "the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity." At the very end of Pym's narrative, it's heard from the "gigantic and pallidly white birds [who] flew continuously" from beyond the wall of mist.
== At the Mountains of Madness ==
Lovecraft's story tips a hat to Poe when the character of Danforth is described as "a great reader of bizarre material" who "had talked a good deal of Poe." The narrator William Dyer says he is interested in Poe "because of the antarctic scene of Poe’s only long story—the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym."
Poe's novel is mentioned again when Dyer and Danforth hear a mysterious sound:Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region’s core. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist—that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
== External Links ==
* The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket full text at Project Gutenberg
* The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket at Wikipedia
Category:Edgar Allan Poe works
Category:Mythos-Adjacent Works
Category:Lovecraft's Inspirations (works)