SOURCE: “Poe's Endless Voyage: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics, Vol. 22, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 276-83.

In the following essay, Zanger discusses the influence of Pym on three later narratives: Jules Verne's Le Sphinx des Glaces, H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, and Charles Dake's “Hans Pfall.”

Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym has provided and continues to provide a variety of critical problems to serious readers. Not the least of these is its perhaps unique nature as a completed work which has itself stimulated a variety of new, extended responses from writers as various as Jules Verne, Charles Dake, and H. P. Lovecraft. The “Note” appended to the Narrative, speaking of the missing “two or three final chapters” has, of course, been the formal justification for these attempts to create new endings for the novel, and...