A Jacket Not Worth Looking At: Shipboard Boredom aboard Herman Melville’s Neversink
This article reads Herman Melville’s White-Jacket as an exploration of shipboard boredom, which oscillates between mechanized labor (tedium) and periods of idleness at sea (ennui). The story, which revolves around a sailor wearing a white jacket among navy-blue uniforms, gives an account of the peri...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2022-12-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/18993 |
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| Summary: | This article reads Herman Melville’s White-Jacket as an exploration of shipboard boredom, which oscillates between mechanized labor (tedium) and periods of idleness at sea (ennui). The story, which revolves around a sailor wearing a white jacket among navy-blue uniforms, gives an account of the perils of shipboard boredom. My contention is that this sailor (subject) gets so attached to his jacket (object) that he becomes unable to tell the difference between himself and the object, which alerts us to the passage from boredom to depression and solipsism. Like the narrator, his fellow sailors find his jacket so disgusting that they do not even want to look at it, condemning the sailor to ostracism and buttressing naval homogeneity. I conclude that White-Jacket is a logical transition from the lack of interest in difference (boredom) to the excitement about encountering the Other (curiosity) in Moby-Dick. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |