Last year, around this time, I would have loved to have had Barth’s essay on Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym for when I was writing essays in Dr. Bluemel’s class or for general classroom discourse. I was pleasantly surprised to find Barth had written about Pym; this novel seems to have a very poor reputation. Leslie Fielder and Borges both wrote about Pym (the latter a strange essay about the use of the color white in the novel). I found the novel to be interesting, not enough to write a paper about, but my classmates more or less did not.