Analysis
"MS. Found in a Bottle" is one of Poe's sea tales, which also include "A Descent into the Maelström" and "The Oblong Box". The story's horror comes from its scientific imaginings and its description of a physical world beyond the limits of human exploration.
Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman says that the story is "a sustained crescendo of ever-building dread in the face of ever-stranger and ever-more-imminent catastrophe". This prospect of unknown catastrophe both horrifies and stimulates the narrator. Like Poe's narrator in another early work, "Berenice", the narrator in "MS. Found in a Bottle" lives predominantly through his books, more accurately, his manuscripts.
The otherworldy ship on which the narrator finds himself invokes the legendary ghost ship The Flying Dutchman. A number of critics have argued that the story's ending references the Hollow Earth theories propounded by John Cleves Symmes, Jr. and Jeremiah N. Reynolds. Symmes and Reynold proposed that the planet's interior was hollow and habitable, and was accessible via openings at the two poles. The idea was considered scientifically plausible during the 19th century. Poe also incorporated Symmes' theories into his later work The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), his only novel. Pym bears a number of similarities to "MS. Found in a Bottle", including an abrupt ending set in the Antarctic.
Poe's work may poke fun at the more outlandish claims in Symmes' theory. Indeed, some scholars suggest that "MS. Found in a Bottle" was meant to be a parody or satire of sea stories in general, especially in light of the absurdity of the plot and the fact that the narrator unrealistically keeps a diary through it all. The other tales that Poe wrote during this time period, including "Bon-Bon", were meant to be humorous or, as Poe wrote, "burlesques upon criticism generally". William Bittner, for example, wrote that it was poking fun specifically at Jane Porter's novel Sir Edward Seaward's Narrative (1831) or Smyzonia (1820) by the pseudonymous "Captain Adam Seaborn", who was possibly John Cleves Symmes.
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