enna24’s Blog

In chapter 41, Ishmael finds out about Ahab’s encounter with Moby-Dick where he had his leg bitten off and was left to suffer for a lengthy period of time. I can imagine that many people in Ahab’s position would similarly want revenge on the being who inflicted so much pain on them, but I doubt that few could take it to quite Ahab’s level. If this journey was not so omen-ridden or smothered with as much foreshadowing for death, I could imagine Ahab sitting in a chair at home after the journey was over, smoking a new pipe and looking at Moby-Dick’s bones or something resting over the mantle and thinking about what creature he was to hunt next, T-Rex perhaps? I really liked the quote about Ahab that read “He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (162). I thought that explained Ahab’s fixation with Moby-Dick perfectly, as only an author such as Melville could write about a character such as Ahab. The word “supernatural” was the one that caught me, because it said that Ahab’s need for revenge ran so deep that nothing in this world could quite capture it.

With chapter 42, I expected to be bored by the end of 7 pages strictly about the color white, but Melville presented so many different aspects to it that I wanted to keep reading. What I gathered from it was that Melville wanted to let people know that while many people associate it with being pure, it’s actually nothing but pure… evil and radiates terror and fear. I don’t think I will ever look at marshmallows, clouds, or blank paper the same way again.

Chapter 37 stood out to me tonight. Ahab was sitting in his cabin, looking out the windows at the sunset and to a bystander would have appeared to be normal and calm. But inside him there’s a fire, a prophecy that says he’ll get Moby-Dick back for taking his leg. I liked the line, “What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad- Starbuck doesl but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” (147). Here, he basically confirmed that he is crazy, only to a higher degree than anyone knows. I don’t know why, but I felt comforted by the fact that he knows he’s eccentric, to put it nicely. It almost makes him more sane knowing there’s something wrong than if he was in denial. And the fact that he has a purpose, to kill Moby-Dick and “dismember my dismemberer” (147) lets the reader know that.. oh wait is it true?… there’s a plot! We found one! I’m sure that going into this book, many know that the object is going to be to find Moby-Dick, but here we have proof that Melville did have a plan. Whether the plan is followed, though, is yet to be determined. Will Melville and the crew get all of their ducks (er, whales!) in a row? We have about a hundred more chapters to find out.

I also liked how chapter 40 was written as a screenplay, and the content in general. The sailors were so funny and whitty, and we finally got to meet the infamous Pip! In wonder if Melville realized that this book was getting long, and was getting bored of writing so he decided to write in a different format? Oh, of course not, all he thought about was how good this book was going too be, regardless of size.

I think we have officially entered the Twilight Zone, or rather Melville’s Zone. In this night’s reading, I felt that Melville’s thoughts became a little more random and disconnected, and made the reader think (or puzzle!) more. First, I thought it funny how right at the beginning of chapter 29 a beautiful scene of the ocean is described. “The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet heaped up- flaked up, with rose-water snow” (112) wrote Melville. The people who have been described to us on the ship are very burly, gruff, and hard men, who I would never associate “perfumed” or “rose-water” scenery. If I were writing this book, I probably would have used darker words to describe their settings, and maybe described the rough crashing of the waves or the bad weather that is more commonly associated with rough sea life. Then again, I think Melville’s writing is anything but normal, to say the least.

What also stood out to me was Stubb’s dream in chapter 31. On the ship one day he tells Flask about a dream he had where he was kicked by Ahab, then saw a merman who told him it was an “honor” to be kicked by such a great man with an ivory leg. This indeed taught Stubb to be careful about how he acted around Ahab in future situations, but what else? Why did he see a merman, and not just a regular person? And why is the chapter called “Queen Mab”?

Note: I just looked Queen Mab up on the ever-helpful Wikipedia and learned that she is a fairy from Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, and she haunted people’s dreams while they were sleeping. This would make sense for the chapter because Stubb was haunted by the very real dream of being kicked by Ahab, and what came after.

As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling; and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales” (98).

I found this quote and others like it funny because Ishmael has only been out at sea for a few days, and already he believes himself to be wise in the business. He already disassociates himself from “landsmen” and is in the group of “us hunters of whales”. Back in chapter 22, Ishmael was still being yelled at for not doing what he was supposed to when Captain Peleg told him to “spring”, and he stood out as someone who did not seem to fit in on a whaling boat. This hypos-inflicted school teacher does not seem like one who would adapt that quickly, and I believe that as he is telling the story, he wants to make himself look wiser and more in place than he actually is. In the whole paragraph of ”And, as for me… for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (101), Ishmael again makes it seem as if he has learned all there is to know about whaling. By the end of the journey he might possibly know more about whaling than he previously did (that being pretty much nothing), but definitely at the moment he has not been to the “Harvard” of whaling schools, he’s more at the community college level.

I also noticed how chapter 23 started out with the line, “Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken on, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn” (97). In class a few days ago we talked about whether this book is the one Ishmael was writing, and I believe that this supports that idea. I really like having Ishmael as a narrator because it’s fun hearing a story from someone who doesn’t always tell the truth. And, when a story is good, I don’t think it matters whether it’s true or not. There is a movie called “Big Fish”, and it’s about a dying man who is reconnecting with his adult son by telling him stories about his own manhood, though many of them are unbelievable. That’s the way Ed, the father, likes it though, and he tells someone else in the movie that he has to be the one to tell his life’s story because anyone else would have told it with “all of the facts, none of the flavor.” Ed and Ishmael both find more importance in a story being imaginative than it being historically accurate.

The quote that caught my attention in this night’s reading was used to describe the Pequot. Ishmael is looking at it and talking about the craftsmanship of it and how antique-looking it is, and then says “An noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that” (68). Like last night’s quote, I wanted to try to fully understand what Melville meant. One thing i have noticed is how Melville doesn’t just state facts, he crafts words around do readers do have to do double takes when reading. I find that this makes the book more interesting because sometimes when reading a long book about seemingly random events, one can sometimes be lulled into a reading hypnosis and read without really thinking. When authors like Melville throw in quotes that are out of the ordinary, one snaps back into processing the material and becomes more engaged. Back to the quote, when reading it I immediately thought about whales. I pictured a large whale (the “craft”) swimming alone in the ocean because all of its pod has been hunted down, and it is just waiting to recieve the same fate (the “melancholy”). In the years when whaling was very popular in the states and on the global scene, whalers hunted their prey with no consideration for the detremental effects that it would have on the future. Populations have been been killed beyond repair (literally) and one of our readings I believe said that nine species of whales are currently on the endangered species list. Also, I remember one day in class we talked about how there is just something mysterious and noble about whales, and there is and always has been. They have inspired logos and classic books, and people all around the world pay to go on tours in the hopes of seeing even one. Maybe it’s their size, their unique blowhole, or their colossal heads, but everything about them draws people in.

Speaking of drawing people in, I thought of people’s attraction to whales when Captain Peleg told Ishmael of how Captain Abab had one of his legs eaten- “‘…it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat!’”- by a whale. Many people on shore just think of whales flipping their tails and blowing water, but out at sea they are very dangerous and unpredictable. I believe that Ishmael will get to experience this first hand soon.

At the beginning of Chapter 12, Ishmael is explaining where Queequeg came from, and says that his homeland of Kokovoko “is not down on any map, true places never are” (56). This quote jumped out at me, and made me wonder what he meant by it. After a bit of reflection, I thought about the ocean. When the whalers are out at sea, they are in uncharted land. Even with maps, their locations are not exactly known and always changing. When out on these expeditions, the men are faced with life and death, good weather and bad weather, and many other experiences that are unique to life at sea. Life at sea might be thought about as a “true place”, not in the geographical sense but in a psychological sense, as in a place where anyone from a teacher to a cannibal can work and live away from rushed, dreary, modern-day life. Where people come together and experience something that can only be truly be understood by the others with him. For me, this relates two weeks of my summer when I was in Maine where I hiked part of the Appalachian Trail with 8 strangers from other schools in Connecticut. We got up at 5 a.m. together, climbed multiple mountains a day together, tipped over in canoes together, and more. On the last day, we talked about how weird it would be when we got home because we would tell our friends and families about what we did, but they wouldn’t be able to truly understand what he had been through and done. Our “place” was the undisturbed wilderness, a place where few people venture to today.

Also, I believe that Ishmael and Queequeg became such fast friends because of the surroundings they were in. When you are in a new situation not knowing anyone, you want one person, any person, even to simply sit with. Though on the outside they teacher and the savage are very different, on the inside they have common goals of friendship and wanting to catch whales.

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