enna24’s Blog

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.

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