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a thousand of their own people), are soon far behind Poe’s heroes, as the two men and one petrified Tsalalian hostage sail southward.
    Oddly enough, the greatest allure of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket comes from these final pages, from this ending. And it comes not from what Edgar Allan Poe does with the finale but from what he won’t do.
    After drifting uneventfully along in this canoe toward the Antarctic, the narrative breaks into dated, diary mode. As their black Tsalalian hostage fades further toward death the closer they get to the polar whiteness, we’re left with this final paragraph, a complete daily entry in a novel that has suddenly reverted to journal form:
The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but, upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
    And that’s it. That’s the ending. That’s it, that’s all, nothing more. That’s the end of the book. No explanation of who the white figure is is given. No word on what happens next. No pseudo-scientific or mystical explanation for the chasm. No explanation of the human figure, or of how they make it back to America. Just over.
    There is an afterword “Note” section to the novel, but it offers basically nothing, just more confusion than solution. For one, it tells us that Pym died, and died suddenly, having not completed the final three chapters of the book—but he somehow managed that earlier preface, supposedly written after the journey. What was this mortal accident? Doesn’t say. In addition, the supposed ghostwriter, Edgar Allan Poe, who knows the final story, refuses to tell it as it is entirely unbelievable. And then we’re told that Dirk Peters, who now resides in Illinois, is unavailable for comment on the matter.
    Stunning. An ending that confounds more than it concludes. Within this we can see genius as well, as amazingly the reaction of the reader is not to throw the book across the room, as we are tempted to do with most literary disappointments, cop-outs, and blunders. Instead, our reaction is to grip it closer. To make our own connections and conclusions where there is no material provided. Our impetus is to find the satisfactory ending that has eluded us, to walk away with an answer.
    You want to understand Whiteness, as a pathology and a mindset, you have to look to the source of its assumptions. You want to understand our contemporary conception of the environment, commerce, our taxonomy of humanity, you have to understand the base assumptions that underlie the foundation of the modern imagination. To truly understand evolution, Darwin couldn’t just stare at dead finches. No, he studied mammals in their embryonic form. How else would he have known that the inner ear owes its structure to what appears in larva stage as amphibious gills? That’s why Poe’s work mattered. It offered passage on a vessel bound for the primal American subconscious, the foundation on which all our visible systems and structures were built. That’s why Poe mattered. And that’s why my work mattered too, even if nobody wanted me to do it. That’s what people like Mosaic Johnson couldn’t understand. It wasn’t that I was an apolitical coward, running away from the battle. I was running so hard toward it, I was around the world and coming back in the other direction.

    Garth failed to see the beauty in this rationale. The poetry in it. He was