The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only person of our opponents who was left alive was Richard Parker.

The Grampus mutiny → small-boat drift → rescue → Tsalal → polar cataract arc uses Richard Parker and the white figure as bookend incitements; the middle rescue-and-Tsalal travelogue drags, so plot scores 78.

We had never before seen the teeth of an inhabitant of Tsalal.

Pym the Nantucket narrator, Augustus the reckless, Dirk Peters the half-breed, Nu-Nu the native ally, Too-Wit the chieftain, and Richard Parker reduced to rationed fourth man carry the gothic-on-the-Pacific scheme, so cast scores 78.

In far less time than I have taken to tell it, we found ourselves masters of the brig.

Single-page mutiny set-pieces alternate with long small-boat and Antarctic drift passages; the closing three Antarctic dates restore velocity, so pace scores 76.

I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven.

The vapor cataract, the white-ash shower, and the towering white figure write American gothic prose for the Antarctic sublime, so prose scores 92.

constitute an Ethiopian verbal root—the root "To be shady"—whence all the inflections of shadow or darkness.

The Nantucket-Ariel-Grampus-Jane Guy-Tsalal-Antarctic chain, plus the appendix's Ethiopian/Arabic/Egyptian re-reading of the chasms, builds a world that out-grows the novel itself, so world scores 90.

My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born.

A flat declarative that precedes the drunken one-AM Ariel sail and Augustus's "so glorious a breeze from the southwest"; American gothic in three sentences, so hook scores 92.

The loss of the two or three final chapters (for there were but two or three) is the more deeply to be regretted, as, it cannot be doubted, they contained matter relative to the Pole itself, or at least to regions in its very near proximity.

The Note's "two or three final chapters...irrecoverably lost" makes the novel end by refusing to end; precedent for Melville, Verne's An Antarctic Mystery, and the postmodern unfinishable, so innov scores 95.

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.

The white figure closes the Antarctic threshold, with Nu-Nu already dead ("his spirit departed"); the Note that follows makes the lost ending part of the novel, so ending scores 88.