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  u “Cannibal Old Me” The Development of Melville’s Narrative Voice Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver. . . . There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller , as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three— storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer. —Vladimir Nabokov M’ first words of the first chapter of his first book appear not as a statement, not as a description, but rather as a direct conversational address to his audience.“Six months at sea! Yes, reader, as I live” (Typee ). It’s as though you struck up a conversation with a stranger at a bar who begins forthwith to regale you with an account of his own remarkable doings. The ensuing paragraph maintains this tone as it touches on one vivid homely detail after another exoticized by its shipboard context. Exclamation points abound, creating the sense of the rise and fall of the speaker’s voice. In fact, the tenor of the six paragraphs that comprise the first passage of this chapter as well as the first paragraph of the next passage can be characterized as exclamatory. The paragraphs maintain a lively, engaging, eager, conversational tone, drawing the reader in as a listener as much as or more than as a reader. Captivated by this compelling voice and the strange setting of the familiar details (bananas, oranges, breakfasting, lunching), we listen with increasing interest: Six months as sea! Yes, reader, as I live, six months out of sight of land; cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific—the sky above, the sea around, and nothing else! Weeks and weeks ago our fresh provisions were all exhausted. There is not a sweet potatoe [sic] left; not a single yam. Those glorious bunches of bananas which once decorated our stern and quarter-deck have, alas, disappeared! and the delicious oranges which hung  05 Edwards ch5 10/31/08 11:26 AM Page 133 suspended from our tops and stays—they, too, are gone! Yes, they are all departed, and there is nothing left us but the salt-horse and sea-biscuit. Oh! ye state-room sailors, who make so much ado about a fourteen-days’ passage across the Atlantic; who so pathetically relate the privations and hardships of the sea, where, after a day of breakfasting, lunching, dining off five courses, chatting, playing whist, and drinking champagne-punch, it was your hard lot to be shut up in little cabinets of mahogany and maple, and sleep for ten hours, with nothing to disturb you but “those good-fornothing tars, shouting and tramping over head,”—what would ye say to our six months out of sight of land? () By this point, the speaker has fully engaged our attention. In these initial paragraphs, the reader encounters an unpracticed writer who achieves his fresh, vivid, and engaging effect through sentences that cry out to be read aloud. The phrasing, vocabulary, rhythm, punctuation, and above all tone of this passage derive from Melville’s already highly developed skills as a storyteller. He is in conversation with himself as well as with his audience. Rhetorically he asks himself the questions that occur to us, to which he then furnishes the answers . Just as he enlivens his descriptions with his rich vocabulary, he personifies the last of the ship’s poultry flock and heightens the humor of this personification by addressing the bird directly in archaic, formal language:“I wish thee no harm, Peter; but as thou art doomed, sooner or later, to meet the fate of all thy race; and if putting a period to thy existence is to be the signal for our deliverance, why— truth to speak—I wish thy throat cut this very moment; for, oh! how I wish to see the living earth again!” The personification continues in the next sentence: “The old ship herself longs to look out upon the land from her hawse-holes once more”(). This personification persists until the end of the passage, set off by the odd, slightly mocking tone, the mix of folksy idiom and tongue-in-cheek formality , and the sharp ear for just the right adjective: “merry land...

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