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Is Moby Dick a comedy?
DiscoZombie
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I've been reading (well, listening to on CD) Moby Dick, and it's pretty hilarious. I always assumed it was a dramatic piece of literature, but it seems like practically a straight-up comedy so far. Am I reading it wrong? Am I missing something? Here's the plot so far:
dude gets the urge to go out to sea
dude finds an inn with a whale bone over the bar
innkeeper says dude is going to have to share a bed with a "harpooner"
innkeeper has a lot of fun at dude's expense with this knowledge
dude finally meets the harpooner. He's a crazy big scary painted shrunken head peddling cannibal.
dude freaks out
dude and cannibal wind up fast friends, cuddling in the morning
dude and cannibal go to a church with a pulpit shaped like a ship's prow, with a rope ladder and everything
priest gives a long-winded nautical-themed sermon
everyone looks at dude and cannibal funny for being friends
cannibal throws some guy ten feet in the air for being rude, winds up saving same guy from drowning
the pair wind up at another equally comical inn, sneak chowder from the kitchen, etc.
dude tries to get cannibal to open their room at the inn, cannibal doesn't answer, dude freaks out and gets the whole staff of the inn, figuring the cannibal is apoplectic
cannibal is just celebrating a pagan holiday by balancing a wooden idol on his head for 24 hours.
they get ready to go out to sea. cannibal sits on some sleeping guy's ass as if he was furniture. this is apparently normal in his culture.
so yeah, sort of a random place to stop but that's as far as I've gotten. There hasn't been any drama to speak of, really. It all seems rather slapstick and cartoonish. I'm not complaining, it's just not what I expected. Does it get super cereal later on? dude finds an inn with a whale bone over the bar
innkeeper says dude is going to have to share a bed with a "harpooner"
innkeeper has a lot of fun at dude's expense with this knowledge
dude finally meets the harpooner. He's a crazy big scary painted shrunken head peddling cannibal.
dude freaks out
dude and cannibal wind up fast friends, cuddling in the morning
dude and cannibal go to a church with a pulpit shaped like a ship's prow, with a rope ladder and everything
priest gives a long-winded nautical-themed sermon
everyone looks at dude and cannibal funny for being friends
cannibal throws some guy ten feet in the air for being rude, winds up saving same guy from drowning
the pair wind up at another equally comical inn, sneak chowder from the kitchen, etc.
dude tries to get cannibal to open their room at the inn, cannibal doesn't answer, dude freaks out and gets the whole staff of the inn, figuring the cannibal is apoplectic
cannibal is just celebrating a pagan holiday by balancing a wooden idol on his head for 24 hours.
they get ready to go out to sea. cannibal sits on some sleeping guy's ass as if he was furniture. this is apparently normal in his culture.
DiscoZombie on
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it's usually not the brooding, serious mythological epic that most people perceive it to be.
Pretty much this. Try reading Don Quixote and understand it was satire through-and-through.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Keep in mind that the post-modernistic art is formulated based on the ideas of dadaism, which is basically nonsense made art. There's more to it than that but I mean... the most influential piece of art is a urinal turned on its side with a joke name scrawled on it.
The way I think of it(as a musician) is that people are always surprised that, for instance, in the entirety of music history, music has been about sex, joking about sex, or about God. And when it's about God sometimes it's about sex too. It's super-obvious, but for some reason, people think that "Classic" means "Classy"
Essentially, People had a sense of humor back then too. It's not a comedy, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have humor or subversion.
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
In other news, genre distinction are all Greek to me.
Yeah, this book's totally Grape-Nuts.
They cast a shadow like a sundial in the morning light. It was half past 10.
Spoiler tags! WTF! Way to ruin the ending!
The forums need an "I see what you did there" emote.