Though Moby-Dick is more than a ship's log, I definitely found its ship lingo and nautical images pretty overwhelming at times. When I saw the comparable whale ship in Mystic, the Pequod's story became a lot more real and relatable. I felt like I could interact with the text more since I knew where on the ship the oil was prepared, where men like Ishmael slept, and where Ahab would have eaten dinner. Seeing everything up-close allowed me to become more than a clueless onlooker, and therefore made the book more interesting for me. In Moby-Dick, Melville provides the reader with "extracts" and other pieces of external testimony meant to corroborate the evidence of the story. These are snippets of information that are held "outside" the main text in order to validate the reader's experience. For me, seeing the ship was a necessary bit of outside "reading" that encouraged my experience with the "inside" reading.
Overall, I really enjoyed the trip! (+ the moussaka pizza - delicious)
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