This post not quite fit under Characters and Characterization, but more under general morality.\u00a0 I will post it in Characters and Characterization, however, because I feel like it connects to my previous post about Melville’s anthropomorphization of the whale.<\/p>\n
In Chapter 61, the mate Stubb kills a whale, as evident by the title.\u00a0 Ishmael seems to sympathize with this doomed creature.<\/p>\n
lazily undulating in the trough of the sea , and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon.\u00a0 But that pipe, poor whale, was they last. (p. 275)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This whale seems somewhat human to Ishmael, lounging in the sun and smoking a pipe.\u00a0 In fact, the pipe is important, as Stubb, the avid smoker, deals the death blow to this creature.\u00a0 In fact, his final act in this chapter is to scatter “the dead ashes” of his own pipe over the water, looking at the whale’s corpse (p. 279).\u00a0 This act is vastly symbolic.\u00a0 The whale and Stubb are linked by the human affectation of the pipe, yet one kills the other, with seemingly little remorse.<\/p>\n
Several chapters later, in Chapter 66, Ishmael describes the whale as a dish.\u00a0 This is prompted by Stubbs’ consumption of a steak from the fellow smoker he slaughtered earlier.\u00a0 Ishmael ponders<\/p>\n
who is not a cannibal?\u00a0 I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provided Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest\u00a0 on their bloated livers in thy pat\u00e9-de-fois-gras (p. 292).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Ishmael seems to see eating an animal as a cannibalistic act, the same as eating a human.\u00a0 However, this seems to be partially based on the civilized, enlightened nature of the gourmand, implying that he should know better.\u00a0 If that is Ishmael’s stance, it would undoubtedly apply to Stubb, who is relatively educated and from America, a man of some standing on this ship.\u00a0 Furthermore, he kills and consumes and animal with remarkable similarities to himself, both physically and in actions (the suggestion of smoking).\u00a0 Is Stubb a cannibal?\u00a0 It seems that Ishmael may, indirectly, be implying that.\u00a0 But the bigger issue seems to be one of sympathy for the animals, perhaps even more than sympathy for the “lean missionary.”\u00a0 Animals, from whales to geese, are seen as human-like by Ishmael, or at least worthy of concern.\u00a0 One wonders, then, why this man has enlisted on a whaling voyage, or even how he can manage to eat meat.\u00a0 Perhaps, like many other issues, Ishmael is merely pondering and reflecting, not claiming to develop an answer.<\/p>\n
(New York: Signet Classic, 1998)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This post not quite fit under Characters and Characterization, but more under general morality.\u00a0 I will post it in Characters and Characterization, however, because I feel like it connects to my previous post about Melville’s anthropomorphization of the whale. In Chapter 61, the mate Stubb kills a whale, as evident by the title.\u00a0 Ishmael seems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661","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=661"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":663,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions\/663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/engl177\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}