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Copywork
About This Passage
Here the chasm reaches its uncanny climax: not chaos but perfect order. Copying this sentence lets a writer feel how Poe's accumulating, measured clauses, 'in substance, in color, and in lateral direction,' build toward the chilling exactness of 'twenty yards,' so the prose itself enacts the rigid regularity that makes the men doubt nature could have made it.
The sides were now entirely uniform in substance, in color, and in lateral direction, the material being a very black and shining granite, and the distance between the two sides, at all points, facing...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Summarize the chapter's movement from the failing food and blocked descents to the exploration of the chasms. Then identify the single moment you think most defines the chapter, and explain why it carries that weight in the book's larger arc.
Discussion Questions
- Trapped and exploring, Pym abandons the language of fear for exact measurement, drawing figures of the chasms in his pocket-book while he and Peters explore. What does Poe gain by making his narrator a meticulous surveyor at the moment of greatest strangeness, and why might that precision unsettle a reader more than panic would? Use specific details from the descriptions to defend your reading.
- Peters reads the marks in the marl as alphabetical characters; Pym refuses that reading until he tests it against the broken flakes. What does this disagreement reveal about how the two men confront the unknown, and why does the chapter let Pym's method prevail? Use the marl evidence to defend your view.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
Strange and remarkable; unlike anything else.
Item 2
Unvarying; the same throughout in form or quality.
Item 3
Even, orderly arrangement following a fixed pattern.
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Critical Thinking
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