Uncertainty and the Role of the Reader
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Letters from an American Farmer, by Michel-Guillaume Hector St. John de Crèvecœurre, both told from a first-person perspective, where the reader depends on a single narrator to relate the story.
Because both Farmer James and A. G. Pym are well-educated, upper-class white men, they present what eighteenth and nineteenth century readers would have undoubtedly felt to be the most reliable type of narrator. However, as the two relate their stories, the authors reveal their narrators’ interpretations to be fundamentally flawed. As the characters hallucinate, dream, or project an idealistic illusion on the events they encounter, they show themselves to be unable to accurately perceive and interpret the situations around them.
In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, these errors of perception seem to stem from Pym’s nervous temperament. There are several places in the novel where he is emotionally overstimulated by the dangers he faces and is momentarily unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The first and most dramatic occurs in the hold of the Grampus, where he has stowed away and becomes trapped. The bad air, spoiled food and stress of believing his death is imminent lead to a string of horrific nightmares he is cannot recognize as dreams. The tension of the scene peaks when, on waking, he is actively hallucinating and mistakes his Newfoundland dog for a tiger. Although he realizes his mistake almost immediately, this is only the first of many times fear impairs his ability to reason.
The inaccuracy of Pym’s perceptions seems to be involuntary and designed mainly to provoke a more emotional and intuitive reaction from the reader. As a man who is extremely excitable, imaginative, and obsessed with the idea that a sudden and unusual death is his destiny, Pym is liable to project his morbid fantasies onto the world around him. The dramatic manifestations of this instability, vivid dreams and hallucinations, heighten the psychological effect of the story, which focuses almost exclusively on his emotional reactions to his adventures, rather than the forward thrust of the narrative itself.
Although the story is presented as a documented occurrence, these breaks from reality also give the reader more freedom to question the authenticity of certain parts of the narrative. Because Pym tends to project symbolic elements onto the events that occur around him, the reader is led to interpret characters that seem unrealistic, such as the white figure at the end of the story, in terms of what they could signify rather than what they actually are.
In Letters from an American Farmer, Farmer James’s deception of both himself and the reader is far more intentional. Crèvecoeur’s goal is to draw a contrast between the pastoral, idyllic life that Farmer James lives, and the social and political underpinnings that make it possible. His tools are the narrative choices he makes regarding which elements of American life Farmer James describes and how he describes them.
This approach is clearest in the letter in which James describes his colony of hornets, which Crèvecoeur uses to draws an analogy between the plight of the hornets and that of slaves in America. James brought the hornets in from the woods to keep the home clear of flies and, in his opinion, they have become domesticated. He assumes (or pretends to assume) that their compliance is voluntary, and writes that it is now their preference to live indoors and serve him. Just as James describes the hornets as complacent in their new homes, he also mentions in passing that he believes freed slaves would prefer to stay with their old masters.
However, the reader can see in both instances that the decision has been taken out of the victims’ hands. Like the hornets were displaced from their original homes, slaves were been brought into the country as an involuntary labor force. The hornets are dependent on their nest and so have no choice but to follow it when it is moved, just as the slaves were forcibly removed from their homes and bound to their masters. The illusion of preference is one James uses repeatedly to justify actions that are clearly detrimental to a certain group.
The falsity of James’s depiction of America is also apparent in the scene where he encounters a slave in a cage. Although he describes American society as inherently liberated and frequently spends large portions of his letters criticizing the repressive lifestyle of European peasants, in this brief scene he shows the slavery of the American South to be a far more brutal and horrific institution than the crumbling aristocracy. The method used to “punish” the slave is repulsive to the reader and even shocking to James. But even this is not enough to change his behavior. James continues on to his dinner date with the people who have deliberately tortured the slave for their own self-preservation.
Crèvecoeur shows James’ way of life to be hypocritical in many ways; all the things he holds valuable are facilitated by conditions and circumstances that he chooses to ignore. The America James believes in serves as a foil to the America he describes, highlighting its faults by comparing them to the potential. At a time when the identity of the nation was an issue of vociferous debate, Crèvecoeur used an unreliable narrator to explore simultaneously two different visions of the future and remind his audience that change requires action rather than ignorance and acceptance.
Both authors wrote under the assumption that what we believe to be is not necessarily what actually is. The way that the dream world bleeds over into the waking one in Arthur Gordon Pym adds to the feeling of insubstantial reality that the narrative depends on, while Letters from an American Farmer uses the disjunction between the real and the ideal to provoke a more thoughtful reaction in its audience. In both stories, these contrasts between illusion and actuality require more of the reader, who is forced to concede the unreliability of the narrator and interpret the events using his or her own judgment.
