SOURCE: “Drink and Disorder in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Beyond the Pleasure Dome: Writing and Addiction from the Romantics, edited by Sue Vice, Matthew Campbell, and Tim Armstrong, Sheffield Academic Press, 1994, pp. 101-08.

In the following essay, Mitchell discusses the theme of drinking in Pym, connecting it with Poe's references to biblical authority in justification of nineteenth-century Southern notions of white supremacy.

According to David Ketterer, in his survey of Pym criticism from 1980-90,¹ recent approaches to the text have included psychoanalytical, mythic, psychological, existential, social, formal, hoax-based, satiric and ironic, deconstructive and visionary studies. As far as I am aware, drink is treated as a serious preoccupation in only a few of those readings. Given Poe's reputation, this is rather surprising. The singer Dean Martin once defined sobriety as the ability to lie on a floor without having to hold on, and somehow the...