In the Heart of the Sea (Assgmt 2)

In the piece retelling the tragedy of the Essex, “In the Heart of the Sea” (2000), particularly chapters five through eight, the author, Nathaniel Philbrick, appropriately conveys the desperation, inactivity, and hopelessness found in the characters after the destruction of their whaleship. Philbrick favors the use of telegraphic sentences to create suspense and indirect foreshadowing, e.g. “Pollard told them that his boat had been attacked by a whale.” (Pg115) Additionally, the author alludes to the social classes during this period using the clannish Nantucketeers as examples. With vivid and intense imagery, Phil;brick creates a vision of mental and physical suffering among the sailors. The audience targeted by the author at this point of the novel is a group of avid readers of nautical pieces and/or adventures tales. The purpose of this section of the book is to detail the loss of the ship, the interactions among the shipmates while in survival mode, and the inclusion of historical facts somehow related to the tale, in order to set up the most certainly remarkable survival in the following chapters.

Vocabulary

• Arduous: requiring hard work or continuous physical effort
• Iridescent: having rainbow colors that appear to move and change as the angle at which they are seen changes
• Incongruous: unsuitable or out of place in a specific setting or context
• Pine: the wood from an evergreen tree, varying from soft to hard. Use: furniture-making, construction, finishing material.
• Proverbial: expressed as a proverb, or resembling a proverb either in form or because of being widely known or referred to
• Provision: the act of providing or supplying something
• Reckoning: the act or a system of calculating something
• Relegate: to move somebody or something to a less important position, category, or status
• Repast: a meal, or the food eaten at a meal

Tone

Shifts from just logical and suspenseful to also fear-provoking and distressed

Rhetorical Strategies

• Telegraphic sentences; “Then it started to blow hard.” (Pg 114)
• Imagery; “The tongue swells to such proportions that it squeezes past the jaws. The eyelids crack and the eyeballs begin to reap tears of blood. The throat is so swollen that breathing becomes difficult, creating an incongruous yet terrifying sensation of drowning.” (Pg 127)
• Similes; “Like male elephants, bull sperm whales tend to be loners…” (Pg 88)
• Irony; “By spurning the Society Islands and Sailing for South America, the Essex officers chose to take their chances with an element they did know well: the sea.” (Pg 99)
• Allusion [to historical facts]; “White sailors often looked to blacks and their evangelical style of worship as a source of religious strength.” (Pg 132)

Discussion Questions

1. What significance does Nickerson play in the retalling of the historical tale?
2. Why does the author favor telegraphic sentences for this particular story to indicate upcoming events, rather than complex sentence structures?
3. What purpose does the inclusion of outside quotes serve in the novel?

Quote

“With every blow of his hammer against the side of the damaged boat, Chase was unwittingly transmitting sounds down through the wooden skin of the whaleship out into the ocean. Whether or not the whale perceived these sounds as coming from another whale, Chase’s hammering appears to have attracted the creature’s attention.”