The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe

This narrative is Poe's lone novel. It starts as a fairly straightforward travel novel. There are voyages at sea, shipwrecks, mutinies and other similar things. However, this being Poe it does take a turn towards the gruesome. The see a ship that they hope is their savior. The Captain seems to be nodding towards them. However, they later see a bird take a chunk out of him and realize that everyone on the ship is well dead. In a later episode the narrator and his companions are near starvation and turn to cannibalism. They go to an island where they seem to befriend the natives, only to have most of their group killed by them. (The narrator and his companion lucked out in getting separated from the group.) Later they end up in remote areas of the south seas. The book comes to an abrupt ending with perhaps some of the true narrative "missing". This book fits well in the canon of fictional travel books from Gulliver's Travels to Around the World in 80 Days and the Land that Time Forgot.