Author Archives: Omar Arvizu

Preparing the Spirit for the Sea

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What struck me about Chapter 17, “The Ramadan,” is the way that Melville transforms an act of silence into one of the finest acts of faith in the novel. When Ishmael discovers Queequeg prone in his room, fasting, his initial response is to fear that his friend has lost his mind or died. But what begins as terror ultimately becomes a lesson in willpower and determination. Observing Queequeg’s peace, Ishmael and the reader learn that one can have faith without words, sound, or even explanation. It is one practiced through patience and inner calm.

Ishmael admits that Queequeg’s rituals seem “absurd,” yet he refuses to mock them, saying he “cherish[es] the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical” (Melville 90). That line made me pause because it is one of the first moments where Ishmael looks beyond his own assumptions. Queequeg’s quiet devotion shows a kind of strength that is not about preaching or proving anything. Melville describes him as “altogether cool and self-collected; right in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life” (92). I love how that image turns stillness into power. It is as if Queequeg’s immobility becomes a shield against the world’s chaos.

What really stayed with me is how Ishmael’s restlessness contrasts with Queequeg’s calm. Ishmael grows “vexed” and impatient, while Queequeg remains unshaken. That difference says a lot about how each approaches the unknown: Ishmael through anxiety, Queequeg through acceptance. By the end, Ishmael realizes that his friend’s faith is not superstition but preparation, the mental strength to endure uncertainty.

This chapter elevates fasting beyond the level of a religious practice. It becomes a symbol of that self-discipline necessary to venture forth onto the vast, unpredictable sea. Queequeg’s quiet resilience feels like a preview of the courage both men will need once they leave land behind. His solitude is not emptiness; it is a state of focus that enables him to bring tranquility into the storm.

Reminders of Those the Sea Took

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Ishmael’s first encounter with the Whaleman’s Chapel reveals that whaling is not only about adventure on the ocean, but about the memory of those it has already claimed. Each is dedicated to a sailor who has been lost overboard, yet they collectively represent something more than separate offerings. Melville employs them to indicate the ways in which death at sea becomes part of the shared identity among the whalers, transforming personal grief into community memory. The chapel is as much a cultural archive as a religious site, where remembering becomes a means of uniting people.

Ishmael discloses the impact of these tablets as he describes, “What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions!” (Melville, Moby-Dick, 41) The line evidences that the plaques are as much about filling an emptiness as they are about outlining a grave. Since there are no bodies to be entombed, the plaques act as stand-ins, keeping a memorial where the sea has taken the deceased. The “black borders” employ the rhetoric of mourning, yet Ishmael’s lament over the “bitter blanks” reveals that the community mourns the absence itself.

Melville also points to how public markers help define communal experience. Ishmael observes women in the congregation whose grief is clearly ongoing, their grief refreshed each time they see the tablets. That way, the plaques do not allow grief to subside into quiet; they remind families and neighbors continuously of what the sea has claimed. The death of a sailor is written into a wider story of loss that the entire community shares.

What makes this moment strong is that Ishmael hasn’t even set sail on the Pequod, yet he already experiences the burden of what is to come. Pequod plaques prefigure the destinies of future expeditions while demonstrating how whaling culture embraces death as an inevitable component of existence on the high seas. By placing this scene even before the adventure begins, Melville ensures that the book is grounded in memory. The sea holds the possibility of adventure, yet the price it demands is forever chiseled into stone, influencing how communities coexist with both the peril it poses and the heritage it bequeaths.

The Whale that Refuses to be Defined

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Before Moby-Dick even begins its story, the “Extracts” overwhelm us with fragments: verses from the Bible, lines from Shakespeare, and snippets of travelogues and natural accounts. At first glance, they read like noise, a jumble of borrowed words that delay the narrative before it even begins. But Melville is doing this deliberately. By bombarding us with quotations, he insists that any single perspective cannot capture the whale. Instead, it exists at the intersection of voices, always slipping out of reach.

The contrast between two quotations makes this especially clear. In one, the whale is Leviathan, a biblical monster that embodies divine power and human helplessness. This image casts the whale as a cosmic force beyond understanding. But only a few lines later, Melville includes Shakespeare’s joke from Hamlet, when Polonius agrees that a cloud looks “very like a whale.” Suddenly, the whale shrinks into something absurd, an ephemeral shape in the sky. Side by side, these extracts jar the reader: is the whale the most powerful beast on Earth, or just a trick of the imagination?

This refusal of clarity sets the tone for the entire novel. If the whale can be both terrifyingly real and almost laughably unreal, then no definition will ever be stable. The Extracts remind us from the very beginning that the ocean’s mysteries are too vast for singular answers. We are forced to read in fragments, to dwell in contradictions, to accept ambiguity as the only truth available. Rather than beginning with certainty, Moby-Dick begins with uncertainty. The whale is many things at once: natural, mythical, terrifying, sacred, ridiculous. It is a mirror of the ocean itself, a force that exceeds comprehension. By frontloading the book with a cacophony of borrowed voices, Melville teaches us how to read the novel: not by searching for resolution, but by embracing the fragments.

Strife is Justice

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When we think about nature, we often imagine balance, ecosystems in harmony, waves rising and falling with rhythm, the shore holding steady against the sea. But Steve Mentz reminds us that this vision of stability doesn’t hold up when we actually pay attention to a massive part of nature, the ocean. In A Poetics of Planetary Water, he borrows Adam Nicolson’s phrase, “strife is justice,” to describe how ecological systems thrive through tension, conflict, and constant change (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). The ocean teaches us that instability, not balance, is the true condition of life, and that lesson changes how we think about both ecology and ourselves.

We see this truth played out every day on the shoreline. The waves erase footprints as fast as they are made. Hurricanes reshape beaches in a matter of hours. The “justice” of the beach isn’t a peaceful balance, but an endless battle between land and water, constantly moving and never settled. As Mentz explains, Nicolson’s tide pools reveal a Heraclitean vision of the world: “Nothing is stable, and yet everything coheres” (Mentz, Poetics of Planetary Water, p. 151). In other words, order doesn’t emerge despite strife; it appears through it.

This idea challenges the comforting “green” ecological ideal of sustainability, where everything is in harmony. Instead, the ocean tells a harsher but more honest story. Systems survive by adapting to disruption. Coherence comes only in temporary, fragile forms, like sandbars that will one day be washed away.

That vision can be unsettling, but it’s also liberating. If strife is justice, then change isn’t failure; it’s the rule of life. The ocean doesn’t offer us peace or permanence. It offers us dynamism. To live with water is to accept instability as our ground, or better yet, our current. And maybe the most human thing we can do is learn how to float.

When The Sea Became More Than Just Water

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One of the most striking points in John R. Gillis’s essay The Blue Humanities is how recently we began to imagine the ocean as something more than a void. For much of human history, the sea was feared, crossed, and used, but rarely admired. It was simply a highway to somewhere else, a space you had to endure on the way to land. Art, both painting and literature, transformed the sea from a background setting into a powerful presence in human imagination.

Before the 19th century, seascapes were almost invisible in the Western artistic tradition. Artists might sketch ships or bustling harbors, but the water itself was rarely the subject. The ocean was considered too flat, too empty, or too dangerous to deserve attention. That changed when painters like J. M. W. Turner and Winslow Homer turned their canvases toward the waves. Turner’s furious storms pull viewers into chaos, and Homer’s quiet horizons make us feel the vulnerability of human beings against vast waters. Suddenly, the sea wasn’t just scenery. It was the story.

Literature took the same turn. When Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he didn’t just write about whaling; he gave the sea moods, tempests, and silences that felt as alive as the characters themselves. The ocean was a force that shaped every decision and every outcome. Later writers like Rachel Carson combined science and lyricism in The Sea Around Us, reminding us that the waves that seemed distant actually sustain life on Earth. Through these works, the ocean became less of a barrier and more of a mirror, reflecting both human ambition and human fragility.

What I find most powerful about Gillis’s argument is that art didn’t just change how we look at the sea, but it changed what the sea means. Once painters and writers showed us that the ocean had depth, power, and beauty, it became part of culture. It became visible. And visibility matters. We cannot imagine climate change, rising tides, or marine ecosystems today without drawing on the images and stories that first made the ocean real to us.

This is the essence of the “blue humanities”: they remind us that the ocean is not blank space at the edges of our maps, but a central part of human life and imagination. To see the sea differently is to see ourselves differently, small, vulnerable, and yet connected to something vast and enduring. Art painted and wrote the sea into being, and now we can’t stop seeing it.

Introduction – Omar Arvizu

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Hi everyone! My name is Omar Arvizu, and I’m an English Comparative Literature major starting my junior year here at SDSU after transferring in from Southwestern College. My goal is to become a teacher eventually, but my ultimate life goal is to write the script for a movie (and why not, win one of those little statuettes that Hollywood personalities love to hand out to themselves).

I grew up in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, and moved to San Diego when I was 16 years old. I had to learn English in a matter of weeks to keep up with the classes. I have lived in National City and Chula Vista since 2018, so these cities have become my home, even though Tijuana will always be my true home. Outside of school, I’m a huge Dodgers fan (huge as in, I watch all 162 games each season, plus the postseason), I love writing fiction, and sometimes, when I feel really inspired, I write poems. The movie theater is my safe place (This year, I started going alone, and it is a one-of-a-kind experience; I fully recommend it). I also enjoy listening to rap music and playing board games with my friends.

As an English major, I have developed a love for reading the classics, which offer such an insight into humanity, even centuries later. I’ve always heard about Moby-Dick but never actually read it, so I’m curious to finally see what makes it such a classic. It definitely looks intimidating, but after reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, I feel ready to tackle any complex text. I’m excited to break Moby-Dick down together and hear everyone’s thoughts in class.

Looking forward to getting to know you all this semester!

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