Here are some quotes and initial thoughts for my investigation of connectedness and isolation through the lens of Melville's Moby Dick:
- "It is a book which could only have been written in America" (vii-viii)
- "Melville wants the whole world in--particularly the human world; hence the slightly improbable spectrum of the crew of the Peqoid" (ix). --> ship as a microcosm of America
- Sea as the new frontier
- "Ishmael, the whale-writer, knows that the great Sperm-Whale, 'scientific' or poetic, lives not complete in any literature . . . his is an unwritten life'. [sic] . . . We must not expect to find Moby Dick in Moby Dick" (xiii). --> In some sense, maybe digital culture is not intended to show us humanity but is rather meant to lead us back to an appreciation of that which is real and present within our lives.
- "Given the radically orphaned condition of modern man (Ishmael ends as an 'orphan', [sic] which is the last word of his book), a danger that Melville could see was the accelerating drift into disconnectedness of the non-affiliated contemporary individual" (xv).
- "How, therefore, men might move from isolation to connectedness was a matter of great moment to him and it pervades the book" (xv).
