August 9, 2019 - Chapters One Hundred Two and One Hundred Three

If you’ve been waiting for a detailed description of the skeleton of a sperm whale, then the two chapters for today are right up your alley. If visuals are your thing, I’m placing a photo below. The point is that Melville does an extraordinary job, particularly in the first chapter, of making something fairly mundane seem extraordinary. By setting his examination of the whale’s skeleton in a garden (bower) in one of the Solomon Islands (Arsacides), he is able to paint a picture of a more enveloping kind of experience than what the real examination would be. I look at the image below and can't imagine a man walking through it like a hallway; I read Ishmael's description, and it's easy.

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