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Poe's Sense of an Ending

1973; Duke University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2924535

1527-2117

Paul John Eakin,

Literary, Cultural, Historical Analysis

I N The Golden Bowl PRINCE AMERIGO recalls wonder and mystery of ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, thing to show, by way, what imagination Americans could have.' For all native power of final image of Poe's longest tale, however, Henry James himself was unsparing in his criticism of its artistic failure: the climax fails-fails because it stops short, and stops short for want of connexions. There are no connexions; not only, I mean, in sense of further statement, but of our own further relation to elements, which hang in void: whereby we see effect lost, imaginative effort wasted.2 In this pair of observations James displays characteristic set of responses which conclusion of Pym invariably elicits: it is at once arresting and arrested, strikinig but unsatisfactory, somehow incomplete in rendering.3 Even Poe himself, in person of editor of tale, would seem to concede justice of such criticisms in his insistence on incompleteness of Pym's published narrative. This insistence, however, is deliberately misleading, for design of tale is complete and fully executed. The charges that Poe's invention was flagging or that his intentions were shamelessly opportunistic sterm, in fact, from a failure to recognize in this instance familiar concluding strategies of his major fictions. Taking as a point of reference a passage from Marginalia, I want to examine these strategies, showing how they work in angelic colloquies, mesmerist pieces, and certain representative tales, with a view toward a deeper understanding of Poe's sense of an ending.