version

Well-known member
I keep losing sight of the fact the whole thing's being narrated by Ishmael. He's able to recount things he wasn't there for and becomes a standard narrator then he'll directly address the reader or start talking about Queequeg and I'll suddenly remember I'm being told a story by one of the characters.
 

version

Well-known member
Just read a rough bit where they're hunting a blind, elderly whale and one of the men stabs it in the balls.

It's interesting seeing where the lines are drawn in what seems a wholly barbarous enterprise. One of the others is basically like "Come on, man. Jesus." and the narration then describes him as humane for taking issue with it. He's perhaps responding to the symbolic attack on masculinity rather than to the suffering of that particular whale. Mind you, every bloke feels it when they see someone or some thing wounded in that area.
 

version

Well-known member
Can't say I'm entirely convinced by his suggestion that St. George fought not a dragon but a whale and rode not a horse but a large seal.

:ROFLMAO:
 

version

Well-known member
@catalog

This bit where he talks about Pip jumping overboard,

"The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."
 

luka

Well-known member
i didnt. i read all the boring bits and advised any future readers to skip them.
 
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