When Is Now? Poe's Aesthetics of Temporality

Time is an essential component in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Augustus's watch runs down and his father's chronometer goes missing. The passage of days, hours, and minutes occupies a great deal of narrative space and anxious speculation. The narrative even assumes the form of a log with its explicit demarcation of months and dates. But time's presence runs deeper than even these instances suggest, as my epigraph from Pym intimates and as this essay will show. Adverbs designating the passage of time, such as "after" and "at length," are a constitutive feature of Pym's narrative fabric, as are adjectives that convey an experience of time, such as "immediate" and "still." As much as Pym's is a journey in space, it is a journey in and through time. And lest we forget, it is also a fictional voyage of exploration written in time by Arthur Gordon Pym/Edgar Allan Poe and read in the time of the 1830s.