YMMV / The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

• Complete Monster: The Cook is one of the leaders of the mutiny aboard the Grampus and the most bloodthirsty member of the crew. Leading a slaughter of the loyalist officers, the Cook hurls a man overboard to drown and kills over twenty others with his axe to knock them into the waves. The Cook plots to go pirate and kill the crews he encounters, while also setting other rivals out to sea to drown.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The novel, published in 1838, features an episode in which a sailor named Richard Parker proposes that the survivors of the shipwreck of the Grampus draw lots to decide who will be cannibalized to save the others, only to end up being eaten himself. In 1884, a ship called the Mignonette left England for Australia and was hit by storms off the coast of Africa. Four men were left adrift in a dinghy with no food or water, but they did manage to catch, kill, and eat a turtle. Starving, they decided one of their number needed to die so the rest might live, and they settled on the youngest among them. He died, was eaten, and the others were rescued four days later, still munching on what remained of his body. His name? Richard Parker.
• Values Dissonance: Even though the novel is generally assumed to be a Stealth Parody of 19th-century travel narratives, including all of the ethnic stereotypes that this genre typically entails, Poe's portrayal of the pitch-black, violent, and treacherous natives of Tsalal seems appallingly racist by modern standards.

---