Thursday, September 22, 2011

Post Four: Moby Dick

Ishmael as a character is starting to confuse me a bit.  In the first part of the story he is obviously in every chapter and does something in every chapter.  Now it seems he has morphed into a silent observer and lecturer about the inner workings of the whaling industry and whales in general.  He has become a character that reminds me of Zampano in the book House of Leaves.  Zampano is a character who has a deep, researched based (even though it isn't real, read the book to understand what I am talking about) way of looking at everything, and justifies his ideas with footnotes upon footnotes upon references, which it seems Ishmael is becoming.  But even though they have all this "research" to support their ideas, they are still as far as you know, embellishing and possibly lying.  I just found this an interesting way for the writers to convince you that this is all real and possibly happening.

2 comments:

  1. I agree here. For the great efforts Melville goes to in order to give credit to his knowledge of whaling lore and the open sea he seems to cut out of time he could have spent making the characters events and their coincidence much more cohesive. He comes off as a 19th century whaling genius, but somewhere along a college sophomore's sense of story writing.

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  2. That's an interesting parallel, Chris. We could think about this: what's the purpose of all that overwhelming research?

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