July 13, 2019 - Chapters Sixty-two and Sixty-three


At this point, we’ve just passed the halfway mark in the novel. The two chapters I’m writing on today – “The Dart” and “The Crotch” – are both quite short. The dart of the first chapter is the first harpoon to be sunk into a whale during the chase. The chapter itself is a bit of an afterthought – strictly speaking, it’s a whaling chapter, but it’s more like the pure cetology chapters in not advancing the plot or developing character at all. The crotch of the second chapter is a kind of wooden rest for the harpoon itself. In all, these short chapters go with the ones immediately before to paint a more complete picture of not only the tools of whaling but also (more importantly) the inherent dangers of it.

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