After the lecture last class, I found it interesting, looking back through the text, to notice how Melville includes bits of his own personal experience and outlook through the guise of Ishmael. \u00a0For instance, when Ishmael describes some impressions of Queepeg, he says,<\/p>\n
“It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. \u00a0I quaked to think of it. \u00a0A peddler of heads too – perhaps the heads of his own brothers. \u00a0He might take a fancy to mine – heaven! \u00a0look at that tomahawk! (21-22)”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This quote particularly strikes me because of the narrator’s absurdity, but importantly, I remembered learning how in 1841 during one of his voyages to the Pacific – possibly it was to the Marquesa islands – Melville himself feared being the victim of a\u00a0cannibalistic\u00a0attack. \u00a0It is rather interesting then to see how even though the author had suffered from this specific paranoia, he chooses an almost mocking tone in narrating Ishmael’s thoughts on the subject. \u00a0 Perhaps by the time he was writing this book – about 10 years later – he had overcome this fear, or maybe it was through being humorous that he became more comfortable about it.<\/p>\n
It was mentioned in class too that Melville’s first novel, Typee<\/em>, written in 1845, was based on his trip to the Marquesa islands. \u00a0I find this interesting that he was able to create, or tell, so many stories from his few experiences at sea. \u00a0Surely they were of great returns. \u00a0This intrigues me as I sometimes think about how authors, whether they aim to write fictionally or autobiographically, are able \u00a0to reinvent through text\u00a0their personal experiences. \u00a0I wonder what intentions Melville had of writing his experiences before he took his voyages. \u00a0He must have known he would be seeing and experiencing places and people that would be wholly new to him, but what’s fascinating to me is how his ruminations and observations are still being read and discussed today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After the lecture last class, I found it interesting, looking back through the text, to notice how Melville includes bits of his own personal experience and outlook through the guise of Ishmael. \u00a0For instance, when Ishmael describes some impressions of Queepeg, he says, “It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage […]<\/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-341","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\/341","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=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}