What Is the White Figure in Poe's Pym? 7 Answers to the Novel's Ending
Edgar Allan Poe's only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), ends with a giant white figure rising from the sea near the South Pole. Poe never explained the figure. Readers have proposed seven main answers, and Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft each wrote a novel to supply one.
In the last scene, Pym and a sailor named Dirk Peters drift south in a canoe on a hot, milky sea under falling white ash. Giant white birds scream "Tekeli-li!" The canoe rushes into a cataract, and the final entry ends: "But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow."
A closing note reports that Pym has died and that his last chapters are lost.
1. Is It the Entrance to a Hollow Earth?
In 1818 John Cleves Symmes Jr., a former Army officer, announced that the earth was hollow and open at the poles. Jeremiah Reynolds lectured with Symmes before he turned to polar exploration, and Poe borrowed from Reynolds for the novel.
Pym's sea grows hotter as he sails south. A chasm opens in the cataract ahead of him. The text describes a human figure and says nothing about an opening in the earth.
2. Is It a Message From God?
The closing note reads the chasms of Tsalal as an Ethiopian root meaning "To be shady." It reads the marks cut in the chasm wall as an Arabic root, "To be white," and an Egyptian word, "The region of the south." The note ends with a line in the style of scripture: "I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock."
Some scholars read the ending as the close of a spiritual journey. Poe wrote that last line himself. Burton Pollin's notes call it Poe's invention, modeled on Job 19:24.
3. Is It Death?
The figure is "shrouded," the word for a body wrapped for burial. The critic Edward Davidson argued that Pym dies at the instant of revelation.
The preface and the closing note complicate that reading. In the preface Pym is home and telling his story. The note reports his "late sudden and distressing death" in an accident it never describes.
4. Is It About Race in America?
The note claims that nothing on Tsalal is white. The islanders are black down to their teeth, and they recoil from anything white. Poe published the novel in 1838, as slavery divided the country.
In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison argued that American writers used dark figures to define white identity. She wrote that no early American writer matters more to that argument than Poe, and that no image is "more telling" than the one that closes Pym. Poe left no statement of what he intended.
5. Did Poe Run Out of Story?
The novel began as a serial in the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837. Poe had left the editor's chair on January 3, and the serial ended with the February number after two installments. Harper & Brothers published the finished book in July 1838 without his name, as Pym's true account.
The first British edition, issued by Wiley and Putnam that October, cut the final entry and the white figure with it. In a draft letter to William E. Burton dated June 1, 1840, Poe called the novel "a very silly book."
The closing note argues against a careless ending. It plants clues and points the reader south.
6. Jules Verne Answered With a Giant Magnet
Verne published a sequel, Le Sphinx des glaces, in 1897. It opens in August 1839 and runs into 1840. Captain Len Guy sails south to find his brother William, captain of the Jane, the schooner that rescued Pym.
On the far side of the pole, about 400 miles short of the Antarctic Circle, the crew finds a rock mass roughly 100 meters high with the outline of a sphinx. It is a natural magnet strong enough to tear the iron from a boat. Pym's frozen body hangs on its side, pinned there by the gun still slung across his chest.
Verne treats Pym as a real man whose notes reached Poe through Dirk Peters. He writes off the white giant as Pym's delirium and puts a soot-dark sphinx of magnetic rock at the end of the journey.
7. H. P. Lovecraft Said Something Was Still Down There
Lovecraft wrote At the Mountains of Madness in early 1931. Astounding Stories ran it from February to April 1936. An expedition from Miskatonic University finds a dead city half buried in ice on a high Antarctic plateau, and the narrator recalls Poe's novel by name.
Something in the tunnels cries "Tekeli-li!" Lovecraft's creatures, the shoggoths, learned the cry from the beings that made them.
In a letter of May 16, 1931, Lovecraft told August Derleth that he was unsure whether his ending needed more definiteness or less, and added: "Remember Arthur Gordon Pym." He borrowed the cry and left the white figure unexplained.
Where Did "Tekeli-li" Come From?
Writing in Poe Studies in 1979, David K. Jackson and Burton R. Pollin traced the word to Tekeli, an 1806 melodrama by Theodore Hook about a Hungarian count. They thought Poe most likely met the title in a footnote to Byron. They also noted, as a coincidence, that Poe's mother, the actress Eliza Poe, played Christine in Tekeli at the Charleston Theatre on March 23, 1811. She died that December, when Poe was two.
Other scholars have proposed Arabic and Hebrew sources. The final chapter of the novel is free to read at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.
Prophet, Bird or Devil, a novel by Nathaniel Free, continues the story that Poe, Verne, and Lovecraft set at the bottom of the world.
Sources
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Harper & Brothers, 1838): the Preface, the final chapter, and the closing Note.
Edgar Allan Poe to William E. Burton, draft letter, June 1, 1840.
Burton R. Pollin, notes to Pym, Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1 (1981).
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, Astounding Stories, February to April 1936.
H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, May 16, 1931, in Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth (Hippocampus Press, 2008).
Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (1957).
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992).
Peter W. Sinnema, "10 April 1818: John Cleves Symmes's 'No. 1 Circular,'" BRANCH (2012).
David K. Jackson and Burton R. Pollin, "Poe's 'Tekeli-li,'" Poe Studies, June 1979.
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