The Epilogue of Moby Dick is somewhat of a letdown.\u00a0 After the epic drama of the whale chase, we are left with a narrator floating in a calm sea for two days.\u00a0 This may seem like an odd way to end this novel, a throwaway page, and in some ways it is.\u00a0 However, I think it is fitting.\u00a0 Ishmael has been an odd, detached, and often invisible narrator for much of this novel.\u00a0 His stories are interesting because of the people in the, and because of his philosophical musings based on these events.\u00a0 However, at this point, there are no other characters left.\u00a0 Everything has been destroyed, and he is too tired to muse.<\/p>\n
Ishmael does not seem to find himself, alone, important enough to ponder.\u00a0 He says “The drama’s done.\u00a0 Why then here does any one step forth?\u00a0 – Because one did survive the wreck.”\u00a0 He makes it clear that the interesting part is over.\u00a0 Furthermore, he does not even say that he is the one who survived, merely that “one” did.\u00a0 Ishmael seems lost without others around.\u00a0 This is a symptom of the invisible narrator who, as I previously discussed, very rarely focuses on himself.\u00a0 Without any one else around, he is at a loss.\u00a0 And that brings about the very sad, lonely, and sparse end of this intense and overpopulated novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Epilogue of Moby Dick is somewhat of a letdown.\u00a0 After the epic drama of the whale chase, we are left with a narrator floating in a calm sea for two days.\u00a0 This may seem like an odd way to end this novel, a throwaway page, and in some ways it is.\u00a0 However, I think […]<\/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-1457","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\/1457","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=1457"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1461,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions\/1461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}