{"id":1298,"date":"2010-03-04T21:00:46","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T01:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1298"},"modified":"2010-03-04T21:00:46","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T01:00:46","slug":"emotional-disconnect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1298","title":{"rendered":"Emotional Disconnect"},"content":{"rendered":"

The end of Moby Dick\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

After class, I was really intrigued with Ishmael\u2019s emotional disconnect at the end of the novel.\u00a0 Rereading quotes from the beginning and end of the novel, I was really struck by how he presented himself after this horrific experience.\u00a0 At first, I believed that Melville was perhaps playing on the fact that Ishmael had post traumatic stress from the sinking of the ship and the loss of so many friends and influential people.\u00a0 Or maybe Ishmael was finally attempting to be a reliable narrator.\u00a0 But neither of these reasons fit Ishmael\u2019s personality, which we have all experienced throughout the book.\u00a0 Therefore, I fully believe that the last section of the book coincides with the insanity and imbalances of Ishmael that we read on the first page.\u00a0 Specifically this quote:<\/p>\n

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; when I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especiallywhenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people\u2019s hats off \u2013 then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.\u00a0 This is my substitute for pistol and ball. (1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After these first few lines, I was really struck again by how insane and unreal Ishmael portrays himself.\u00a0 An individual who has a firm or even slightly less firm grasp on reality would never present himself, in a novel concerning a life changing voyage, as insane.\u00a0 It is as though he is warning his audience that he unreliable before we even get to the second page.\u00a0 Furthermore, to say that he becomes reliable at the end of the novel because of his emotional disconnect as seen in the following passage, it completely ridiculous:<\/p>\n

Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last.\u00a0 It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan. (552)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If anything, the emotional disconnect that Ishmael displays just shows how bizarre and unstable he is.\u00a0 For all of his previous comments that seemed to say that he was \u201cmarried\u201d to Queequeq and could not fathom the thought of living without him, there is no mention of Queequeq\u2019s die.\u00a0 There is not mention of anyone else, his only comment is that he is the only one that survived.\u00a0 In my mind, that displays the type of individual who is narrating the story.\u00a0 It displays that Ishmael is not reliable, never was reliable and even warned us that he was unreliable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The end of Moby Dick\u2026 After class, I was really intrigued with Ishmael\u2019s emotional disconnect at the end of the novel.\u00a0 Rereading quotes from the beginning and end of the novel, I was really struck by how he presented himself after this horrific experience.\u00a0 At first, I believed that Melville was perhaps playing on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-narrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1298"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1300,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1298\/revisions\/1300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}