"Although 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' has served as a suggestion,
or even a pattern, for some of our best recent stories of adventure, and
although it has many points of excellence in itself, it is not the story
alone, but the opportunity which the story affords of an analysis of
Poe's mind, that creates the greater interest for me. I have always been
puzzled to find a reasonably adequate cause for the incomplete state of
that narrative. The supposition that Poe had not at his disposal, at the
moment he required it, the necessary time for its completion is an
hypothesis which I only mention to dispose of. At its close he wrote and
added to the narrative a 'Note' of nearly a thousand words; and in the
time required for the penning of that addition, he could have brought
the story to--perhaps an abrupt, but still, an artistic close. No. Then
did Poe not complete 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' because his
imagination failed him--failed to supply material of such a quality as
his refined and faultless taste demanded? If so, then why did he begin
it? Why write more than sixty thousand words in his usual careful and
precise style, on a subject to him little known, in to him a new field
of literary effort? He could in the time required to write 'The
Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' have written from five to ten short stories
along familiar lines. No: none of these hypotheses explains the
unfinished state of that narrative. My explanation is that the story has
a foundation in fact, and that Poe himself never learned more than a
foundation for the portion which he wrote. Its leading character next to
Pym is one Dirk Peters, a sailor, mutineer, etc. It is my theory that
Pym and Peters existed in fact, but that Poe never met either of them,
though he did meet sailors who had known Dirk Peters, and that he heard
from them the first part of the story, in the form in which it grew to
be repeated by seafaring men along the New England coast in the '30s and
'40s. Having heard what he supposed to be sufficient, with the aid of