Ishmael’s Night of Rest and Relaxation

Abstract

My article on Moby-Dick explores the juxtaposition of self and other, alienation and community, friendship and leisure. By way of the book’s famous fourth chapter, “The Counterpane,” I argue that repose, conceived as a way of spending time, exposes some of the contradictions of the capitalist dictum of industriousness. The quilt that features so prominently in the chapter is to be underestood as a figure of resting and relaxing, which accumulates a patchwork of additional meanings through Ishmael’s contradictory experiences during the night at the Spouter-Inn with Queequeg.