Etymology through Chapter Four

• n. The study of the origin of words and the way they have changed throughout history.
• Melville gives us the word for whale in many different languages.
– MULTIPLICITY: Everything can be interpreted in many ways. Each person’s truth is individual; there is no one right or wrong.
• The usher who compiled the list is a failure/a weak man.
– TRUTH: Attempts to understand anything will always fall short. Man cannot comprehend in the way God can.

• Here, we have an extremely varied collection of quotations, from the Bible, to Shakespeare, to scientific texts, to historical accounts and songs.
– GENRE: The whale is a huge topic; this novel will be a huge book. It will try to tackle all sorts of topics and issues. To do so, it will use all types of writing. You’ll see narrative, song, dictionary, scientific writing, historical writing, and others.
– This is the FIRST book to mix genre in this way.
• Again, the sub-sub librarian, a man who tries to collect knowledge, is a failure.
– TRUTH: Man cannot ever truly know, as God does. We are too small and weak-minded. The attempt is futile.

• “Loomings” suggests, first, that something is going to happen (something is looming).
• The word has negative connotations, so this something is negative. FORESHADOWING

• “Loomings” also connects to a MOTIF in the novel: WEAVING.
– A loom is used to weave.
– Keep your eyes out for weaving imagery in the novel. We’ll figure out its many meanings as we go.

• Ishmael goes to sea as an antidote to his depression. His name suggests that he is a kind of outcast.
• THE SUBLIME:
– Men are attracted to water.
– Deep thought and water are connected.
• “It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (3).

• He goes as a sailor because he’ll get paid.
• Men do rankle a bit at being ordered around, but they get used to it. “Who ain’t a slave? […] so the universal thump is passed around, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder blades, and be content” (4).
– POLITCS/RACE: Worker’s rights / Slavery

• He also goes because of Fate (5).
– Fate vs. Free-Will vs. Chance
• He is interested in the whale.
– TRUTH: The whale represents truth. He tries to encounter it face-to-face in order to learn as much as he can about it. This is like trying to understand the truth by being close to and observing NATURE.

• He has no money, and the weather is bad.
• He stumbles into an African American church, and the sermon is very sad and scary.
• He finds The Spouter-Inn (like a whale’s spout), which is run by Peter Coffin.
– FORESHADOWING: Coffin + Whales = death while whaling
• He muses about Lazarus and the Dives (“rich man”).

• First, he sees the painting: “Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant”
(11).
– TRUTH: Man is drawn to the unknown and the unknowable, and he doesn’t like not knowing.
– MULTIPLICITY: There are many different ways to interpret what the painting is.
– FORESHADOWING: It’s a whale impaling itself on a ship’s mast.

• When Ishmael first hears he will have to share a bed with someone, he is wary. He becomes even more so when he hears it’s a “darkcomplexioned” man who eats rare steaks.
– RACE: At the time, people were taught to fear and look down upon dark-skinned people from Africa and island nations because it was said that they were all cannibals.

• The harpooner is out selling heads; when he comes in, the tattoos on his face, his strange hair, and his “heathen” ritual (22) frighten
Ishmael.
– THE OTHER: We are meant to understand that
Ishmael fears what is strange and different:
“Ignorance is the parent of fear” (21).
– RACE: He says, however, “a man can be honest in any sort of skin,” (20) showing that he is not really racist.

• THE OTHER: Queequeg is startled when he notices Ishmael, but he only demands to know who Ishmael is, and once Peter Coffin clears it up, he’s very polite and civil, and Ishmael notices that he’s quite clean.
• Ishmael thinks, “the man’s a human being just as
I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” (24).

• As a boy, Ishmael had felt a supernatural hand in his one night, and he had been very scared.
This morning, Queequeg’s arm is over him,
“hugging” him (26), and it feels that way, but not scary.
• It’s a “comical” “bridegroom’s clasp” (26). He yells out that it’s unbecoming to be “hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style”
(26).

• Queequeg turns out to act more polite and civilized than Ishmael does! (27).
• Queequeg doesn’t know all the rules though; he thinks his feet should be covered up, but not his private parts. He also washes his chest, not his face (28).