Chapters 21-28
We’re off to sea. The cuddleing is over now, the man will have to become men because from what I hear, whaling isn’t just a trip on a boat to enjoy the weather. Ishmael and Queequeg have another strange conversation with Elijah before boarding the ship as he asks if they saw “anything looking like men” going onto the ship (Chapter 21). Ishmael, again puzzled, says he thought he saw some figures walking on but once the married couple hop on the ship, there’s only one guy on the ship as well Captain Ahab-still hiding out in his cabin.
We see some more foreshadowing while Ishmael talks about dying on a ship in relation to the sailor Bulkington, eventually concluding it’s not that bad. We know this ship is done for, and there’s going to be deaths at sea, but only a few hundred pages until the whole thing sinks. I wonder if that guy who plays the tamborine will play as it goes down, but somehow I sense it won’t exactly be like the Titanic.
Ahab seems more scary than I imagined him to be. I thought he would just be a guy on the boat and hide out depressed all the time. I didn’t even notice when he was described that his pegleg is a part of a whale until I was reading some other blog posts. That makes him have even more of an evil feeling that he’s half human, half the enemy. Soon we’ll see how Ahab runs the ship and if he is really as bad as he seems.
