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Edgar Allan Poe's Response To The End Of Writing

478 Words2 Pages

This novel by Poe is dripping in madness and an interpreter's dream. There are so

many themes and critical viewpoints to go off of it was tough for me to choose just one. For this

response I will be focusing on the ending of the story. I want to argue that the true ending is

actually written in the preface of the novel being that the preface are Pym’s last written words.

Normally after reading a novel would the reader wouldn’t return to the preface but if you look at

the novel chronologically and the preface being the last words written by Mr. Pym, returning to it

make more sense, and by doing this you get unity for the novel. I found it strange for some of the

words in the preface to fall under italics, and these two specifically …show more content…

As soon as we read the preface we’ve fallen into a trap, Poe makes us read the beginning,

and the end, just to end up back where we started. Of course Poe knew the ending probably

before the preface was even written. It would make sense for him to use the year between the

copyright date and the publishing to perfect the preface even further, and since the publication

and the preface are dated the same year this may be used as evidence to support my thought. The

preface might also serve as some form of control over a novel that Poe never thought would

make it to print. The writing of the preface also gives the novel an overall unity, it stands to give

the narrative authenticity, while also providing the denouement, which are viewed using

italicized words. The only two words that remain are “ruse” and “expose”. While the entire text

was written specifically as a ruse, Pym states in his preface that the following is an expose. Pym

is exposing fiction that isn’t supposed to be fiction, and what we really want the exposed is the

human figure in the last chapter. After following this complete failure of an adventurer

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