Queequeg

And later, this dying to self will become formalized, so to speak, when he realizes that his duty as a simple sailor requires him, when the whale boats are lowered in pursuit of whales that have been sighted nearby, to man one of the oars of one of those boats and, as he says, break his own back, pulling himself back foremost into death's jaws.

And recognizing that this is an unalterable law of wailing, he sets about writing his will with Queequeg as both his witness and beneficiary.

After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, Ishmael says, I felt all the easier.

A stone was rolled away from my heart.

In the end, the potential of our grandest visions must be sacrificed.

for the sake of realizing a few good and, hopefully, nourishing words.

If I could, I would have spent more time on the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael.

I would have included a look at the chapter titled Queequeg in His Coffin, in which Queequeg, convinced he is dying, makes for himself a coffin carved all over with the same images that adorn his tattooed body.

That's the only reason.

He and Queequeg are looking around because they haven't seen, they haven't been in this space before.

So it would make sense that this is the moment where Ishmael is going to get reflective.

But if he came here every weekend for...

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Now at this time it was that my poor pagan companion and fast-bosom friend Queequeg was seized with a fever which brought him nigh to his endless end.

Be it said that in this vocation of wailing sinecures are unknown.

Dignity and danger go hand in hand till you get to be captain the higher you rise the harder you toil.

So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooner, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but, as we have elsewhere seen, mount his dead back in a rolling sea, and finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and, bitterly sweating all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and sea to their stowage.

To be short, among whalemen, the harpooners are the holders, so called.

poor queequeg when the ship was about half disembowelled you should have stooped over the hatchway and peered down upon him there where stripped to his woollen drawers the tattooed savage was crawling about amid that dampness and slime like a green-spotted lizard at the bottom of a well and a well or an ice-house it somehow proved to him poor pagan where strange to say for all the heat of his sweatings he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever and at last after some days suffering laid him in his hammock close to the very sill of the door of death how he wasted and wasted away in those few long lingering days till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing But as all else in him thinned and his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes nevertheless seemed growing fuller and fuller.

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man never yet was put into words or books.

That's chapter 19.

If you've read the novel, uh, you can recall that before Ishmael and Queequeg get on the Pequod, they are accosted by a beggar in the street, and his name is Elijah.

And he warns them in very cryptic language about what they've actually signed away when they signed the papers to board the Pequod.

And he suggests that what they've signed away is their souls, not just the couple of years of their life.

Mm

... that Ishmael is in a somber mood, even though he does notice that Queequeg, his best friend, gives him, like, a thumbs up and like, "Come sit by me." Um, still-

[laughs]

... at that, Ishmael is sort of, like, somberly noting and, and gives his best recollection of what the cenotaphs say.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, so you, you bring up an interesting point.

I think it's very interesting that Queequeg is present, and like, I'm almost...

Like, so much of this for me reads...

So he's describing something that is quite dramatic if we picture it.

Like, holy shit, this is Queequeg about to get eaten by sharks if that rope slips in any way.

And he's explaining this convention of the whaling industry of doing this.

But at the same time, it then, as with so many of these other chapters, as we'll see, becomes a moment of reflection because Ishmael slash Melville is so philosophical.

He imagines, you know, divine providence linking them in this grand mystical way.

And then this is the other thing I just wanted to say I really love about these chapters that I think get underplayed by people who think Moby Dick is so serious, you know, you've got to take it seriously.

It's very funny because when Queequeg, you know, faces the danger of almost getting eaten and then is brought back on the ship, Stubb insists that he get some sort of restorative to get his spirits back up because he nearly died.

And when we find out that the assistant to the cook, a guy named Doughboy, a kid named Doughboy, brought him something non-alcoholic, stubbed in rants about there's temperance afoot here and he's mad.

Don't be afraid now, said he, grinning again.

Queequeg here wouldn't harm a hair of your head.

Stop your grinning, shouted I.

And why didn't you tell me that that infernal harpooner was a cannibal? I thought ye knowed it.

Didn't I tell ye he was a peddling heads around town? But turn flukes again and go to sleep.

Queequeg, look here, you sabbee me, I sabbee you this man sleep you, you sabbee? Me sabbee plenty, grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed.

You gettee in, he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk and throwing the clothes to one side.

He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way.

Andy, you got there first with the line, "Eat it, Ishmael." But I'm afraid you misstepped.

The harpooner was not Ishmael, but his bunkmate, Queequeg.

I am sure many people will have [laughs] pointed this out.

[laughs]

It's hilarious.

Ishmael and his terrifying but deeply loyal new friend, the tattooed harpreneur Queequeg, are trying to secure passage to Nantucket.

Which was the undisputed whaling capital of the globe at that time.

Right.

So, Ishmael is staying at the Spouter Inn in New Bedford.

The inn is overcrowded, so the landlord tells him he has to share a bed with a harpooner he's never met.

Which turns out to be Queequeg.

Yes, a heavily tattooed Pacific Islander who carries a tomahawk pipe and a wooden idol.