{"id":1313,"date":"2010-03-04T22:30:16","date_gmt":"2010-03-05T02:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1313"},"modified":"2010-03-04T22:30:16","modified_gmt":"2010-03-05T02:30:16","slug":"how-to-survive-in-melville%e2%80%99s-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/?p=1313","title":{"rendered":"How to survive in Melville\u2019s World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melville seems to end his stories on a somber note. \u00a0Moby Dick<\/span>, Bartleby the Scrivener<\/span>, and Benito Cereno<\/span> all have some people die and some survive in their final moments.\u00a0 Let us examine Ishmael, the lawyer, and Delano – three survivors.<\/p>\n

In Moby Dick<\/span>, largely due to Ahab\u2019s leadership, everyone but Ishmael perishes by the white whale.\u00a0 Ishmael is this self-taught Renaissance man who seems to know a bit about everything.\u00a0 He is not particularly integral to the Pequod\u2019s crew and is more a tool for Melville to narrate and muse.\u00a0 We learn at the beginning that Ishmael goes to sea because he\u2019s depressed and feels alienated from society.<\/p>\n

The lawyer in Bartleby the Scrivener<\/span> is vain and a bit conceited, but definitely generous.\u00a0 He keeps defective staff members on his payroll and doesn\u2019t fire Bartleby when he stops working.\u00a0 He tries to understand Bartleby and why he stops doing his job, but to no avail.\u00a0 Nonetheless, he retains his interest in the enigmatic scrivener and narrates his story to preserve his odd legacy.<\/p>\n

Captain Delano seems like a moderately intelligent and contemplative, yet somewhat naive captain. \u00a0We note that he realizes something is amiss and sometimes this distracts him, but he always brushes these troubling thoughts away.\u00a0 Had Delano been more suspicious, he probably would have given some kind of indication of his suspicion and been killed by Babo, along with Cereno.\u00a0 I can see the lawyer in Bartleby the Scrivener, a moderately intelligent but strangely detached from reality kind of person, doing the same thing.\u00a0 Bartleby, like Cereno, acts strangely and confuses the lawyer, who doesn\u2019t immediately fire Bartleby but rather remains contemplative and never assumes the worst.<\/p>\n

In class we discussed this almost endearing ignorance found especially in Delano and to an extent, the lawyer as a distinctly American quality.\u00a0 Ishmael doesn\u2019t seem to be quite as ignorant, but he\u2019s just as pensive.\u00a0 Contemplating life, the people in one\u2019s life, and one\u2019s environment (not always accurately) seems to bring the three survivors together.\u00a0 Maybe Melville was similarly inclined to reflect on such matters.<\/p>\n

Now consider those who die – specifically Ahab, Bartleby, and Cereno. \u00a0\u00a0Bartleby is puzzling.\u00a0 The reader doesn\u2019t learn much about this odd scrivener, except that he was a good worker until he stopped.\u00a0 Bartleby seems depressed and eventually lacks the will to continue living.\u00a0 We don\u2019t know the origin of his depression, but we can speculate that it had something to do with work. \u00a0It\u2019s similarly difficult to get a handle on Cereno\u2019s character.\u00a0\u00a0 Ahab definitely has a contemplative side, as seen in his heart-to-heart with Starbuck during \u201cThe Symphony\u201d and he\u2019s undoubtedly clever, but his one-track mind seems to overpower any deeper thoughts that may begin to occupy his consciousness.<\/p>\n

Another interesting point is that Ahab, Bartleby, and Cereno all lost a significant amount of their humanities prior to conking out.\u00a0 Ahab was a man on a mission with complete tunnel vision from the start of the book, Bartleby was estranged from his work and preferred not to do anything, and Cereno lived in complete terror of Babo.\u00a0 None of them were emotionally free.\u00a0 None of them could ponder like their surviving counterparts.<\/p>\n

There are lots of parallels we can draw between the characters that ultimately end up alive or dead at the end of these three stories.\u00a0 I can\u2019t list them all here but thought these connections were interesting.\u00a0 Perhaps Melville wanted to make the point that free, contemplative thought, even if it borders on ignorance or na\u00efvete, is a desirable quality or one that\u2019s necessary for long-term survival.\u00a0 In real life, practical people who take action quickly are more likely to survive a given situation, but Melville desires a world in which the qualities he treasures keep people alive.\u00a0 In Melville\u2019s world, this type of musing is what adds the human element.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melville seems to end his stories on a somber note. \u00a0Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener, and Benito Cereno all have some people die and some survive in their final moments.\u00a0 Let us examine Ishmael, the lawyer, and Delano – three survivors. In Moby Dick, largely due to Ahab\u2019s leadership, everyone but Ishmael perishes by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313","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=1313"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1313\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}