July 14, 2019 - Chapter Sixty-four


This chapter, in which Stubb eats a steak from the whale he’s just killed, offers what passes for “comic relief” in this novel, apparently. Really, it’s just a very Amos & Andy-style celebration of racial stereotyping, with Stubb heaping abuse on Fleece, the ninety-year-old black cook on the Pequod. So far, I’ve been trying to extend the benefit of the doubt to Melville by applying Dan Carlin’s “grade racism on a curve” rule, but a chapter like this one just makes it hard – what which the “dialect,” the abuse itself, and so on. It’s frankly disheartening.

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