September 15, 2008
“[A]ll deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore”
Posted by Mr. W under Am Lit I1 Comment
Anne compares Moby-Dick to Big Fish (and, I think, she ought to read The Things They Carried, which gets at the same ideas about truth and storytelling):
In class a few days ago we talked about whether this book is the one Ishmael was writing…I really like having Ishmael as a narrator because it’s fun hearing a story from someone who doesn’t always tell the truth. And, when a story is good, I don’t think it matters whether it’s true or not.
James was one of several who brought up the Bulkington issue:
Ishmael cannot believe after four years on a ship whaling, that a man would crave another dangerous voyage. He talks about all the safety a port should bring a mariner. Ishmael’s great description of comfort, hearthstone, supper, blankets and friends made me too question Bulkinton’s sanity.
And Valerie neatly sums up the importance of reading each others’ blogs:
Ahab seems more scary than I imagined him to be. I thought he would just be a guy on the boat and hide out depressed all the time. I didn’t even notice when he was described that his pegleg is a part of a whale until I was reading some other blog posts. That makes him have even more of an evil feeling that he’s half human, half the enemy. Soon we’ll see how Ahab runs the ship and if he is really as bad as he seems.
The point of doing this, of course, is to share information about what we’ve read, expand on some class discussions, etc. Hopefully this is helping everyone understand Moby-Dick a little better.
September 16th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
I actually have read The Things They Carried and liked it very much. I forgot about that book until now, but now see how similar the narrator was in that book to Moby-Dick.