UNIT 2:
*Moby-Dick; or, The Whale*
By Herman Melville
“Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

Meeting 14: the pequod meets the rose-bud

Today we’ll begin with the fifth vocabulary and sentence composition quiz. Then I want to show you one of your passage analyses on the board. We’ll finish today with Moby-Dick and what is one of the novel’s strangest chapters.

Homework:

Read Chapters 96-102 of Moby-Dick, pages 461-492. Mr. Norkus will help to teach Tuesday’s class.

Meeting 13: pitchpoling and the grand armada

After some practice with absolute phrases and appositive phrases, Mr. Lojo will walk us through the recent reading from Moby-Dick. With respect to the final chapter, “The Grand Armada”, Why does Ishmael linger on the baby whales? What does their vulnerability reveal about the larger scene and about the violence surrounding them?

Homework:

Read Chapters 88-95 of Moby-Dick, pages 428-460. Mr. Stagg will help to teach Friday’s class.

Meeting 12: “the pequod meets the virgin”

The latest 6 chapters work together nicely: in the first 5, Ishmael pauses from the main plot to explore the head of the whale. What interesting facts do we learn about the whale’s head? Now that you know those facts, how well do you feel like you really know the whale? I would imagine not particularly well. And this might be Ishmael’s point: to have basic facts about something, to have information about something, does not necessarily mean you know that something. And maybe that’s why he pairs the first 5 chapters with another gam, a gam during which two whaling vessels compete to chase down a sperm whale, a giant beast they think they know but really don’t understand at all.

Next, know that your next vocabulary and sentence composition quiz is this Friday, October 30. It will cover the nouns, lists 1 and 5. The new phrases we’re adding are appositive phrases and absolute phrases. Today we’ll start with appositive phrases. And then move to absolute phrases.

Homework:

Read Chapters 82-87 of Moby-Dick, pages 395-427. Mr. Lojo will help to teach Tuesday’s class.

Meeting 11: passage analysis revision checklist

Take out your passage analysis. Today we’re going to walk through a revision process to remove as many crutches from your writing as we can:

Forms of “to be”, Progressive tense, Excessive modification, Wordy phrases, Phrases that can often disappear, The “naked this”, Improper integration, and Verb weakness

Lastly, we’ll discuss Mr. Girotto’s selection from the recent reading of Moby-Dick.

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 76-81 of Moby-Dick, pages 368-394. Mr. Fikac will help to teach Monday’s class.

Meeting 10: ishmael’s musings

Moby-Dick is not a traditional novel as you’ve undoubtedly noticed. The novel tells a traditional narrative, but it also serves as a handbook on the whaling industry and a textbook about the anatomy of whales. Even more recently we’ve seen that the novel morphs into a Shakespearean play, complete with scenes of dialogue between minor characters and even three soliloquies. In the latest readings, we’ve also witnessed Ishmael using ordinary references to the whaling industry to launch toward a philosophizing on metaphysical ideas. Today I’d like for us to consider Ishmael’s musings.

Take as an example the first one we encountered in our last class: Jameson showed us how Ishmael used the simple weaving of a sword-mat as a launchpad to a reflection on fate and free will.

EXAMPLE: The Sword Mat → As Ishmael and Queequeg weave the sword-mat, Ishmael begins to see the weaving as a picture of human life. Some parts seem fixed by fate, some are shaped by our own choices, and some are changed by chance. The finished mat depends on all three working together. Human life, according to Ishmael, is shaped by destiny and choice, an inseparable mixture of fate, individual agency, and accident.

Now you work together on one of the following chapters: “Brit”, “The Line”, “The Whale as a Dish”, “The Blanket”, “The Funeral”. Your task is to trace the movement of Ishmael’s thinking from the ordinary to the extraordinary:

(1) Identify the ordinary object, practice, or detail from the world of whaling that Ishmael begins with.

(2) Identify the larger idea that Ishmael begins thinking about because of it. Decide what Ishmael seems to be suggesting about human life, nature, society, God, knowledge, or existence.

(3) In two or three sentences, explain how the ordinary detail leads Ishmael to the larger idea. What does he notice about the object or practice that makes him begin thinking philosophically?

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 70-75 of Moby-Dick, pages 338-367. Mr. Girotto will help to teach Thursday’s class.

(2) Finish your passage analysis.

Meetings 8/9: practicing passage analysis

After the quiz, turn to page 219: Re-read Ishmael’s commentary on Ahab in “The Chart”. Start with “Often,” and take it to the end of the chapter. As you read, think about how Ishmael characterizes Ahab. Underline the parts of the paragraph that you think best show you your insight.

Now open a Google doc. Just as we did for your analysis of a section of The Road, we’ll work together to write a paragraph about Ahab.

Imperatives for the impending inaugural (indispensable) interlude:

(1) Read the following chapters from Moby-Dick: Chapters 48-53, 58-64, 67-69. Mr. Montroy and Mr. O’Dell will have an opening thought to help with Tuesday’s class.

(2) Continue work on your passage analysis. We’ll have time in class to work on and revise them when we get back from break.

Meeting 7: the whiteness of the whale

Turn to “Dusk.” Let’s finish where we left off last class: Re-read the chapter, carefully this time. Develop a clear claim about what Starbuck’s thoughts reveal about his character, and support your claim with specific evidence from the soliloquy. This might be our claim:

“In “Dusk,” Melville characterizes Starbuck as morally clear but personally weak: he understands that Ahab’s quest is dangerous and wrong, yet he cannot bring himself to resist it.”

Prove it.

Your next writing assignment of the semester asks you to do something similar with a passage of your choosing. Here is the assignment.

In “Moby Dick” and “The Whiteness of the Whale,” how does Ishmael infuse meaning into the whale? What is Ahab’s perspective of the whale? What is Ishmael’s perspective of the whale?

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 43-47 of Moby-Dick, pages 213-235. Mr. Lane will help to teach Wednesday’s class.

Meeting 6: (Enter ahab: Then, all.)

We need to start today by finishing the participial phrase practice that we began last time. After that, with the extra time we have today, I’ll give you a chance to work on finding good definitions for your next set of vocabulary words.

Take out your poetry packet. Let’s revisit our two poems about America. Do you see some any common ideas yet among Moby-Dick, “America,” and “The New Colossus”?

Aarav is at the helm today; I’ll take the mast. He’ll lead us through a discussion of Ahab’s power in “The Quarter Deck”.

Soliloquy literally means talking alone, and it has been used as a form since the Greeks, though popularized by Shakespeare and his contemporary playwrights. In the theater, no thinking can be made directly available to the audience unless it is brought to speech, so it was necessary to propose a convention: the character would speak aloud, and the audience would understand that what they were to imagine they were hearing was what the character was saying to himself, or what he would say if he were to give voice to his thought. Melville stops writing a novel at this point and begins writing a play. Not just any play but a Shakespearean play complete with two soliloquies. So, what do we learn about the interior lives of Ahab and Starbuck in “Sunset” and “Dusk”, respectively?

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 39-42 of Moby-Dick, pages 186-212. Mr. Mikaloff will help to teach Tuesday’s class.

Meeting 5: “a khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of leviathans”

Captain Ahab is one of the great characters in the history of American literature. He’s an inventive, imaginative creation of Melville’s mind. He’s both a hero and a villain. Melville allows Ishmael to have access to Ahab in private and public moments. I want us to come up with a rich characterization of Ahab just using what we learn about him in chapters 26-31.

First, mine the text for quotations; these can be things Ahab says to other characters or to himself or—even better—things Ishmael says about Ahab. We get both a first-hand and second-hand account of Ahab. What are things that make him heroic, a great leader, charismatic? What are the things that make him dangerous, even villainous?

I’ll give you a little time toward the end of class to work on your preparation for the next vocabulary quiz. We’ll finish class today with more participial phrase practice.

Homework:

Read Chapters 33-36 of Moby-Dick, pages 158-181. These are important chapters, especially “The Quarter-Deck”. Mr. Saini will help to teach Friday’s important class. Please note that the reading schedule adds chapters 37 and 38. You do not need to read these chapters before class; we’ll read these live together in class on Friday.

Meeting 4: knights and squires (x2)

Before turning to the latest chapters of Moby-Dick, I’d like for us all to look at a few of your “Loomings” creative assignments.

At last, we’re at sea. But along the way, we’re introduced to a number of the key characters in the novel: Ahab (though we don’t meet him), Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Peleg, Bildad, Daggoo, and Tashtego. In your groups, I’d like you to find passages from the latest chapters that build our initial impression of each of them. Does it seem strange to you that Ishmael gets on the Pequod without ever meeting Captain Ahab?

Homework:

Read Chapters 28-32 of Moby-Dick, pages 133-157. Mr. Castillo will help to teach tomorrow’s class.

Meeting 3: bosom friends

After our vocabulary quiz, we’ll review our next sentence part, participial phrases, which I think many of you learned last year.

Ryan and I will lead you through the latest chapters of Moby-Dick. Throughout these latest chapters, Queequeg repeatedly turns out to be more competent, generous, and composed than the people who look down on him. In “Bosom Friend,” Ishmael says, in effect, that Queequeg’s sincerity and humanity make his “savage” identity increasingly irrelevant. Is Ishmael actually overcoming prejudice, or is he simply replacing one stereotype of Queequeg with another, more flattering one? What evidence supports either reading? What is Melville doing with the contrast between “civilized” and “savage”? Is he merely reversing the categories, or questioning whether they make sense at all?

What does Melville want us to notice about how quickly Ishmael and Queequeg become friends? Why might Melville make Ishmael feel more comfortable, trusting, and even affectionate with someone he initially regards as frighteningly foreign than with the supposedly familiar Christian society around him?

From the wheelbarrow story through their arrival in Nantucket and the chowder scene, Melville keeps giving us comic encounters with unfamiliar customs. Why is comedy so important here?

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 16-27 of Moby-Dick, pages 76-132. Split the reading into two sections, one to complete over the weekend, one to complete asynchronously on the 9/28. Mr. de Leon is going to co-teach this section.

(2) Complete your “Loomings” Assignment.

Meeting 2: neither caterpillar nor butterfly

After a quick quiz, we’ll explore Ishmael’s characterization of Queequeg especially at the end of “The Spouter Inn” and “The Counterpane”. Why do you think Ishmael is so fascinated by Queequeg?

What is the function of the Whaleman's chapel sequence and the sermon? Check out a few of my photos from the actual chapel where Melville spent time. It’s called Seaman’s Bethel, located in New Bedford, Massachusetts. In it you’ll find the pulpit Melville describes as well as the marble tablets Melville shows you in “The Chapel”. Each name on the tablet has attached to it a whaleman’s narrative, a long story just like Ishmael’s.

At the end of class, we’ll look at some sample “Loomings” responses, and I’ll give you some time to think about your own creative response. Remember that it’s due on Tuesday.

Homework:

(1) Read Chapters 10-15 of Moby-Dick, pages 55-75. Mr. Lam is going to co-teach this section. Take notes in your packet: use quick phrases to record plot points you may need to refer to later; jot down questions you want to ask in class about moments you don’t understand; draw anything worth drawing; transcribe quotations you deem important so you can have them all in one place. Think of your packet as the scrapbook you keep during what I hope will be a memorable experience in a classroom. And know that you’ll be able to use your packet during any quizzes we take.

(2) Study for your third vocabulary and sentence composition quiz.

Meeting 1: Call me Ishmael.

In chapters 1-3, we’re introduced to one of the great narrators in the history of literature, a quirky first-person narrator who will also be a main character in the early going of the novel. What do we learn about him? What is he after? What are some of his quirks as a character and as a storyteller?

Let’s look closely at “Loomings”. Why does Ishmael need to go to the sea? Why does he say all people, at some point or another, are drawn to the sea?

A quick pep talk: You’re undertaking the reading of the greatest work of American fiction and one of the world’s greatest works of art. It’s an undertaking to read this novel, but it need not be arduous if you’re disciplined. An undertaking, yes, but that does not mean you should simply set it down and walk away when you hit a tough or a boring chapter. It’s a rewarding book to those who work the hardest and put in the time it requires. Work hard. You will be rewarded.

Homework:

Read Chapters 4-9 of Moby-Dick, pages 28-54. Take notes in your packet: use quick phrases to record plot points you may need to refer to later; jot down questions you want to ask in class about moments you don’t understand; draw anything worth drawing; transcribe quotations you deem important so you can have them all in one place. Think of your packet as the scrapbook you keep during what I hope will be a memorable experience in a classroom. And know that you’ll be able to use your packet during any quizzes we take.

Here is a handy document you might consider printing and having with you while you read: Allusions in Moby-Dick

You may find it useful to use the audio recordings from The Big Read; each chapter has a special guest reading it. Listening along will help, especially at the beginning. The readers are (mostly) excellent at capturing the tone of each chapter.