I particularly liked this image from the Jan. 27 blog post, so I'm going to post it again.
Chapter 135, "The Chase -- Third Day" and "The Epilogue."
So we conclude the reading group that began on Nov. 4. Of course, if my fellow bloggers, Oz and Eric, want to add something and do another post, I would be happy to run it.
I would suppose that some of the people who might be reading along with us are reading the novel for the first time, and don't know what happens at the end. So I would prefer to avoid spoilers!
Still, I feel comfortable noting one more time that Melville does well when action is taking place.
"What a lovely day again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world." A lovely passage about a day that will be filled with horrors.
"Time itself held long breaths with keen suspense." A moment of calm before the action.
And the ending has a couple of nice ironies to it, but I can't explain that without giving away the ending!
The last sentence of the novel is referenced in the title of "Another Orphan," a 1982 novella by John Kessel, a story about a contemporary man who goes to sleep and wakes up to find himself aboard an old-fashioned sailing ship with a diverse crew: "The crew was an odd mixture of types and races: there were white and black, a group of six Orientals who sat apart on the rear deck and took no part in the work, men with British and German accents, and an eclectic collection of others — Polynesians, an Indian, a huge, shaven-headed black African, and a mostly naked man covered from head to toe with purple tattoos, whorls and swirls and vortexes, images and symbols, none of them quite decipherable as a familiar object or person."
Plus, the ship's captain offers a pretty good clue about the situation: "Fallon looked back with him and saw the black figure there, heavily bearded, tall, in a long coat, steadying himself by a hand in the rigging. The oil lamp above the compass slightly illuminated the dark face — and gleamed deathly white along with the ivory leg that projected from beneath his black coat. Fixed, immovable, the man leaned heavily on it. 'Ahab,' the sailor said."
Kessels story won a Nebula Award, so some of the science fiction fans reading this blog entry may well remember it. Discussion here, the particular issue of F&SF is available on the Internet archive.
Thank you to Oz and Eric, and to everyone who has followed along with us for weeks!
5 comments:
Terrific post. Thank you for hosting this study group. I have enjoyed it, although I have had little to say about the novel. I feel sort of numb during the current presidency, but this study group has made the voyage a little easier.
I found this discussion group both edifying and highly enjoyable, a great encounter with a classic novel. Thank-you Tom for presenting it and to everyone who participated whether silently or not. It's hard not to talk about this section without giving away the ending. Similar to the coincidence with 93 from last week, we find a sky-hawk closing out the drama before the "Epilogue." Horus gets placed as the reigning deity of this age by those who follow the 93 current and he has the head of a hawk. This sky-hawk appears to resonate with its symbolic status when Melville describes him as: "the bird of heaven, with its archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards..." Unless I read this wrong, in the same sentence, the penultimate sentence of chapter 135, Melville describes the Pequod as his, the hawk's, ship.
Ishmael appears to go into a state of Grace in the "Epilogue"; he's protected for no apparent reason from environmental dangers. The vehicle that begins this state gets "liberated by reason of its cunning spring" giving the final "c+s" trope in the book.
I found the ending to be a bit abrupt, especially for a book so prone to meandering. The fact that our (sometimes) narrator Ishmael being safe and sound is explained in a one-page long Epilogue almost felt like an afterthought.
I am glad I read this book, as this was my first time.
I often found it pretty boring (most of the more technical chapters), but I did not mind too much. Somehow, I think that is part of the 'fun'. There might be something to be said about having to work your way through big books, to adapt to the pace of the novel instead of getting frustrated because it's not unraveling the way you wanted it to. Almost like meditation, in a sense: accept things as they are at the moment, in a non-judgemental way. Take it as it is and go with the flow.
If I had signed up for a 3 years long contract on the Pequod, most of the time I wouldn't have anything else to do than play 'right were you are sitting now', considering every single part of the ship, and the crew, and how amazing it is that it took billion of years for all of it to finally come together and make my situation the way it is.
Moby Dick the book is constructed a bit like that, in my eyes.
Reading it at a slow pace and with a group of critters with such interesting ideas definitely added to my enjoyment.
Once again, I feel grateful for this reading group and want to thank everyone who took part.
I've decided that the sky-hawk at the end must represent Ahab's soul, then it makes sense. This appears another influence of Egyptian mythology, one of the seven souls they postulated, the "ba", has a hawk's head with a human face.
I plan on rewatching, probably next week, the John Huston 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick, which I have not seen since childhood.
If anyone is interested in doing the same and exchanging opinions on how it compares to the book, as a sort of coda to this reading group.
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