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
his own imagination, to make an interesting story for publication, Poe
began and continued to write. Then, as he progressed, he found that his
imagination was embarrassed--frustrated by the known facts already
employed--whilst it was not assisted by new facts which he was positive
existed, but which he could not procure. As he attempted to close the
narrative, the cold, written page was a very different thing from what
he had conceived it would be as he sat in the tap-room of some New
England old 'Sailor's Home,' with a couple of glasses of Burton ale on
the table, listening through the drowsy afternoon to the fact and
fiction of some old 'tar,' as the two looked across the white-sanded
floor at the old moss-grown dock without, and listened to the salt
wavelets splashing against its rotting timbers, and watched the far-
distant sails on the outer sea.
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