Sep 10 2008
Entry for Chapters 10-15 Reading
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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I like this idea a lot. The bit about people at sea not really knowing where they are also reminds me of the plight of the men of the Essex, who, even though they figured out their coordinates, knew so little about their surroundings that they were afraid to land on islands that they believed were inhabited by cannibals.
As you read this book, definitely keep paying attention to how the Pequod becomes its own community.