SOURCE: “P/P … Tekelili: Pym Decoded,” in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 14, No. 1, March, 1988, pp. 82-93.

In the following essay, Smith discusses Pym using Roland Barthes's critical method of “decoding” and deems the work “a metafictional classic.”

Modern readers of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym seem to have evolved into two distinct and contradictory classes. In the first category are what we might call the “hoaxers,” who take Poe at his word about his “silly book” and solve all the cruxes of the text on the basis of a perceived intent to hoax the public with a potboiler adventure fiction. The hoaxers assume that Pym is a deliberate parody of fiction in violation of Poe's well-known critical opinions concerning the tale and its effect; for them it is a longer example of the genre of “A Predicament.” In the second category we have the “Freudian Fryers,” who...