The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket · Chapter
XXIII explained
Pym and Peters, stranded on the hilltop, exhaust their food supply and attempt to find a way down, but are blocked by chasms and precipices.
What happens
Pym and Peters, stranded on the hilltop, exhaust their food supply and attempt to find a way down, but are blocked by chasms and precipices. They explore a series of black granite chasms, discovering strange indentations in marl that resemble figures and letters, which Peters mistakes for writing but Pym proves are natural formations. They find no escape and return to the summit, dejected.
Themes in this chapter
Liminality and Transformation
The chasms and the hilltop represent a liminal space between life and death, with Pym and Peters trapped in a transformative ordeal.
The Unknown and Cosmic Horror
The strange, perfectly regular chasms and the figure-like indentations evoke a sense of cosmic mystery and the unknowable.
Characters to notice
- Arthur Gordon Pym
Narrates the chapter; explores the chasms and deduces the indentations are natural.
- Dirk Peters
Accompanies Pym; suggests the indentations might be alphabetical characters.
Key passages
“We had made a kind of penthouse on the platform, furnishing it with a bed of dry leaves, and placing in it three large flat stones, which served us for both fireplace and table.”
They built a shelter on the hilltop, using dry leaves for bedding and flat stones as a hearth and table.
Describes their makeshift camp.
“We found that it would afford us no food, with the exception of the unwholesome filberts, and a rank species of scurvy grass, which grew in a little patch of not more than four rods square, and would be soon exhausted.”
The hilltop provided only inedible filberts and a small patch of bitter scurvy grass, which was nearly gone.
Highlights the scarcity of food.
“With a very slight exertion of the imagination, the left, or most northern of these indentures might have been taken for the intentional, although rude, representation of a human figure standing erect, with outstretched arm.”
One of the marks in the marl vaguely resembled a crude human figure with an arm extended.
Describes the ambiguous figure-like indentation.