August 21, 2019 - Chapter One Hundred Twenty-six


Today’s chapter sees the first fatality of the novel – a man falls overboard during a watch for the white whale, and the life-buoy of the chapter’s title is also lost in the attempt to save him. Queequeg offers the coffin of an earlier chapter to be used as a new life-buoy, since the ship can’t be without one. This is an odd inversion of an earlier point, i.e., that an instrument of death will be used to preserve life. Again, having read this novel before, I know how it ends and I know that Ishmael is the sole survivor. In the event that you (the reader) have not, I won’t spoil the matter of how he is saved.

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