. . the resemblance [of the penguin] to a human figure is very striking . . .” (chapter 14). This penguin connection for the phrase “human figure” is revealing. If we recall that at the novel’s beginning the boat Ariel collided with the ship Penguin, then we may infer that at the novel’s close Pym’s canoe, approaching the “human figure” that is “very far larger . . . than any dweller among men,” will also collide with the ship Penguin. The final chapter covertly reflects the first chapter: in both chapters, a small vessel is destroyed by the Penguin and those on the small vessel are rescued by those on the Penguin. Accordingly, we may understand how Pym returned from his Antarctic adventure.

If we move a step further and note the most “astonishing” characteristic of the penguin and its neighbor the albatross, as stated in chapter 14—their “spirit of reflection” (a phrase not in the Morrell/Woodworth source passages)—then we may conclude that the penguin and the albatross suggest a mirror. According to this reasoning, the ship Penguin that appears at the book’s beginning, accompanied by the scream of what seem to be “a thousand demons,” and the ship Penguin that appears at the book’s end, accompanied by the screaming “gigantic and pallidly white birds,” stand for mirrors, and the double appearance suggests two mirrors—facing mirrors, as in the cabin of the Jane Guy in chapter 18. (There is, interestingly, only one mirror in the source passage from Morrell/Woodworth.) Infinitely reflected between these facing mirrors in Pym is “Too-wit,” the native chief, who was said to be “in the middle of the cabin.” Correspondingly, in the middle of Pym—midway between the facing mirrors, in the eleventh of twenty-two paragraphs in chapter 13, the central chapter of twenty-five chapters—is the infinitely reflected death of Augustus/Henry on August 1. Arguably, Poe is providing for his literary audience a coded infinite reflection suggesting memory—what he termed in “The Philosophy of Composition” (his 1846 essay on the writing of “The Raven”) “Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance.”

The remaining portion of the novel’s subtext involving Poe’s family is implied by his aforementioned comment that “. . . there can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother—it is not so much that they love one another as that they both love the same parent. . . .” Richard Wilbur has noted that the name “E. Ronald” in the first chapter is an anagram for the maiden name of Poe’s mother, “E. Arnold.” Furthermore, the white “shrouded human figure” not only reflects Poe’s brother but also itself signifies Poe’s mother. This is hinted by the fact that the figure appears on March 22 surrounded by birds crying, “Tekeli-li!” In the Charleston Courier—a newspaper from which Poe would later borrow for the poem “Annabel Lee”—Poe’s mother Eliza Poe was listed as appearing in a play titled Tekeli. The play, performed on March 23, 1811, had first been scheduled for March 22. Eliza’s role in Tekeli was that of a bride—she probably would have been dressed in white.

Writing in the January 1836 issue of the Messenger, Poe praised an essay by Barthold Niebuhr, a piece asserting that in Dante’s Inferno the allegory—the story beneath the story—is a personal one. It certainly seems as if the allegory here described, in Pym, is a personal one. The private nature of the novel may have been implied by the Tsalalian natives’ cries of “Anamoo-moo!”: in Poe’s Morrell/Woodworth source for portions of the later chapters of Pym, reference is made to the native name for the southern of New Zealand’s two islands—“Tavi Poënammoo” (365). While Poe did object to allegory if it was obtrusive, he accepted allegory if it was “judiciously subdued”—and Poe’s familial allegory in Pym certainly is so subdued.

Pym is, then, a memorial volume, a book that honors Poe’s dead mother and brother. Pertinently, Poe wrote of his mother in December 1835, shortly before he began Pym, that she was “a string to which my heart fully responds.” And ten years later, he added: “The writer of this article is himself the son of an actress—has invariably made it his boast—and no earl was ever prouder of his earldom than he of the descent from a woman who, although well-born, hesitated not to consecrate to the drama her brief career of genius and of beauty.” He apparently confided to a friend that from his mother he had received “every good gift of his intellect, & his heart.” If we recall that Henry twice visited Edgar in Richmond, we may readily imagine that the two brothers had many conversations about the mother they both cherished; the older Henry would naturally have shared his more plentiful memories of her with his younger brother.