The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Chief of Tsalal, Too-wit is the novel’s main antagonist. Upon meeting the crew of the Jane Guy, he behaves in a rather caricatured way, as though the arrival of these white interlopers were a welcome event: “[The chief] evinced symptoms of extreme surprise and delight, clapping his hands, slapping his thighs and breast, and laughing obstreperously” (114). He is immediately friendly and welcoming to the sailors, as are the rest of the villagers, and he is willing to comply with all their demands. When Captain Guy tells him that no more than 20 of his people can visit the ship at a time, for example, he is “perfectly satisfied” with the arrangement; he soon invites the crew to his village, and he receives them at his hut with great ceremony. He is generous toward his visitors and is “good to his word” when he promises to provide them with duck, tortoise, fish, brown celery, and scurvy grass (122). He seems to be a respected leader, and the tribe members, who apparently live in peace and harmony, follow his orders without question. Other than Pym, all the crew members trust Too-wit and are happy to enter into this informal partnership.

Upon betraying the Jane Guy crew, Too-wit is revealed to be a duplicitous villain. However, he also becomes a mirror image of Pym. Like the protagonist, Too-wit is comfortable lying to people when it serves his own ends, and he is willing to put on a performance if that is necessary to sell the lie. For example, he manages to ensure his visitors will be unarmed when they enter the ravine by saying in his language—but making himself understood to the English speakers—that “there [is] no need of arms where all [are] brothers” (125). He performs a fabricated familial relationship in the same way that Pym acts against an actual familial tie when he conceals his identity from his grandfather. The two acts are essentially inversions of one another. However, in his narration, Pym does not recognize the similarities between himself and Too-wit, describing the latter—along with the rest of the villagers—as “the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe” (125). By refusing to acknowledge any affinity in their behavior, instead condemning the entire community in extreme terms, Pym employs the racist language and preconceptions of the European and American colonization mindset. While he views Too-wit as villainous and antagonistic, understanding this cultural context reveals that Too-wit’s distrust of the crew and his violent actions are efforts to protect his people from the predictable patterns of colonial violence.

Augustus Barnard is Pym’s best friend and sidekick. Eighteen years old at the beginning of the novel, he has a significant influence over Pym and is responsible for much of what happens in the first half of the text. Prior to their journey together, the two were already very close: Pym recalls that they used to stay up all night while Augustus told him stories from his travels. Pym is aware that some of these tales are probably not true, but they further motivate the younger boy to go to sea. Like Pym, Augustus seems comfortable lying when it serves him. When the two take the Ariel out at night, for example, Augustus claims to be sober enough to sail, but he is not. Pym writes: “Turning my eyes upon him, I perceived at once that, in spite of his assumed nonchalance, he was greatly agitated [....] his conduct [...] had been the result of a highly-concentrated state of intoxication” (4, 5). This deception almost results in both boys’ deaths, but, like Pym, Augustus is either unaware of this cause-and-effect relationship or unbothered by it. In fact, Augustus reports that the most frightening part of the wreck of the Ariel was the extent of his intoxication and the powerful hold the alcohol had over him that night.

After the mutiny on the Grampus, Augustus becomes a loyal caretaker to Pym, whose presence in the hold he has to conceal to keep both of them safe. At great risk to himself, he brings Pym food and water and keeps him updated about what is happening on the ship. Additionally, the fact that he secretly arranged to bring Tiger aboard indicates that he knows and cares about what will keep Pym happy.

While he demonstrates his bravery during the fight to take back the Grampus, the stab wounds he receives make him relatively helpless for the rest of his time in the story. In another narrative inversion, he becomes the one who requires the most care from the others. Days before succumbing to gangrene on the hulk of the Grampus, he constantly prays for death so he can be released from his suffering. His passing seems to have a profound impact on Pym and Peters: “His death filled us with the most gloomy forebodings, and had so great an effect upon our spirits that we sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper” (88). In much the same way that his lively stories about sea voyages initiate the narrative itself—providing the motivation for Augustus and Pym to board the Grampus—his death causes a silent, heavy pause in the narrative.

Dirk Peters is a crew member on the Grampus who becomes Pym’s close friend and ally for the rest of the novel. He works as a line manager on the ship. After the mutiny, he comes into conflict with another group of mutineers, who are led by the cook. Peters is the son of a white fur trader and an Indigenous American woman from the Upsaroka tribe, and Pym frequently refers to him as “the hybrid.” Peters’s physical appearance is described in greater detail than that of any other character in the text, with much of that description focusing on his extreme physical strength. For example, although he is no taller than four feet, eight inches, “his limbs were of the most Herculean mold,” and he is “one of the most purely ferocious-looking men” Pym has ever seen (32). The narrative also sustains racist presumptions in its language that dehumanizes him by comparing him to animals or monsters. His hands, for instance, are “so enormously thick and broad as to hardly retain a human shape” (32). To cover his baldness, he sometimes wears “the skin of a Spanish dog or American grizzly bear” draped over his head, and even when he smiles, “the merriment must be that of a demon” (32). Pym goes a step further and claims that Peters’s “natural ferocity” is a result of his Upsaroka blood, employing the era’s stereotypes related to Indigenous people. This allows the narrative to simultaneously excuse his frightening countenance as something he cannot control and emphasize his perceived otherness.

However, Peters acts entirely differently than his appearance might suggest he would. Prior to the mutiny, this physically powerful man is mocked by the crew, who regard him “with feelings more of derision than of anything else” (32). He is unexpectedly kind to Augustus, saving him from the violent cook more than once and seeming to expect nothing in return. He even frees Tiger after the dog gets stuck beneath the whaleboat (36). After the hulk of the Grampus rolls over and flips Pym and himself into the ocean, Peters saves Pym’s life. This prompts Pym to reflect on Peters’s endurance of their trials together: “Peters, it will be seen, evinced a stoical philosophy nearly as incredible as his present childlike supineness and imbecility” (90). Part of Peters’s “hybrid” nature, then, is his ability to be simultaneously strong and malleable, mature and innocent, wise and oblivious. Toward the end of the novel, as he and Pym are sailing toward the “limitless cataract,” Peters’s feelings are inscrutable:

And now, indeed, it would seem reasonable that we should experience some alarm at the turn events were taking—but we felt none. The countenance of Peters indicated nothing of this nature, although it wore at times an expression I could not fathom (149).

Such an unreadable air is another form of agglomeration, or multiplicity: Peters could be thinking anything in these final moments. Similarly, as readers learn from the End Note, he is alive at the time of publication, residing in Illinois, “but cannot be met with at present” (153). This vague phrasing implies that Peters exists in the objective physical world of the US but is not an active participant in it. In a number of ways, Peters is simultaneously the most thoroughly described and the least clearly defined character in the novel.