this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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It's wild how good this book is relative to how few people have read it.
"The only part I remember is 'I now commit this body to the deep'"
I remember I thought it was awful when I read it in seventh grade, but tbh I trust the opinion of a random stranger online more than I trust seventh grade me.
The one thing I remember was the kid Kenny who sat next to me in english period looked at the page I was on and picked out a sentence that was something like '"God damn it!", the cook ejaculated." and made a big thing about it and the teacher started yelling at us to quiet down. I genuinely don't think I'd remember the book existed otherwise.
Its one of my favs. On the surface its a character study, but there's a lot of powerful philosophical, social, and psychological questions in there, and a critique of US dog-eat-dog individualism. And it manages to be entertaining also.
For me, Wolf Larsen represents or embodies Satan (at least, Satan as a literary figure). His ship is a veritable ship of lost souls, all of the ship's hands are either recruited in drunkenness or fleeing something that seemed worse at the time. He's incapable citing scripture, which would be a really uncanny thing for a captain of his day, and even curses God.
The way he finds Hump even parodies the Divine Comedy; Hump (Dante), an honest but kind of hapless writer, becomes lost. The man who would guide him comes and finds him, and lo and behold, his guide is no Virgil, but, rather, Satan. Imo, the thing that really sells this is that Hump passes out underneath the golden gate (passes through the gates of hell) and is lost and found in the fog, which mirrors the conditions in the first circle of hell, Limbo. Rather than spending their voyage showing Hump what has happened while preventing him coming to harm, Wolf puts Hump in harm's way and spends the voyage trying to convince him of what is. By the end, the formidable captain, much like the Satan of Paradise Lost, is bound in darkness, remaining proud and sure to the end.