SOURCE: “The Arabesque Design of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 188-213.

In the following essay, Thompson discusses the narrative structure of Pym and concludes that in his treatment of the idea of epistemology in the narrative, Poe anticipates postmodernist aesthetics.

The devices of aesthetic fantasy may be conventional or otherwise. In the opinion of Jorge Luis Borges, the most ubiquitous devices of fantastic literature are four: the double, the voyage back in time, the contamination of reality by irreality, and the text within the text.

—John Barth, “Tales Within Tales Within Tales” (1981), reprinted in The Friday Book, (1984)

Early in his career, Poe conceived of an interrelated sequence of experiments with generic forms of popular literature. One of the earliest of these framed-tale collections was called “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque” (1833). With the addition of fourteen more tales...