Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

What do we want to see after Rexpresso 2?

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JD:
Psssst, your spoiler didn't work

akronnick:
I'm pretty sure Melville wanted the audience to know that Ismael survives the story, considering the first line of the novel is 'Call me Ismael.'

For a first person narrative to work, the person telling the story has to be alive long enough to tell the tale.

Also, considering that Moby Dick has been standard High School literature class fodder for about nine thousand years now, this particular spoiler ranks right up there with 'It was his sled!'

raoullefere:
You gotta be kidding. My classmates would have run, screaming, had they been asked to read Moby Dick. Except me, of course—I read it when I was thirteen. Got about a third of it then, more in subsequent readings. Funniest thing about it I recall from a grad school course on the American novel, when my professor, after I asked him why we weren't reading Moby Dick, said because we were studying the progression of the American novel, and Moby Dick was, as, far as he could tell, implanted in Melville's brain by time travelers—it should have been written in 1951, not 1851.

As for spoilers, my contribution: Kristin did it!

Carl-E:

--- Quote from: akronnick on 20 Apr 2010, 16:28 ---I'm pretty sure Melville wanted the audience to know that Ismael survives the story, considering the first line of the novel is 'Call me Ismael.'

For a first person narrative to work, the person telling the story has to be alive long enough to tell the tale.

Also, considering that Moby Dick has been standard High School literature class fodder for about nine thousand years now, this particular spoiler ranks right up there with 'It was his sled!'

--- End quote ---

Yes, but in the first edition, the epilogue was missing.  In the last chapter, the ship went down with all hands.  The epilogue described Ishmael being washed up on shore.  Without that, the story really made no sense overall, no matter how good the descriptive narrative was. 

So the critics panned it, and the first edition never sold out.  The second ediition (printed in America) had the epilogue, but it took a long time to recover from the hit his reputation took.  Melville died a very bitter man... 

Binary:
Hang on a minute. Dora's cat wrote Moby Dick?          :-D

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