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Chapter 14
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Moby-Dick, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Limits of Knowledge
Fate and Free Will
Nature and Man
Race, Fellowship, and Enslavement
Madness
Religion
Summary
Analysis
Ishmael and Queequeg disembark in Nantucket and, upon the recommendation of Peter Coffin, proceed to an inn owned by Coffin’s cousin, a man named Hosea Hussey. Ishmael and Queequeg, after some searching, find this inn—the Try Pots—and meet Mrs. Hussey, who is taking care of the inn while Hosea is out. Ishmael finds the picture of two gallows on the inn’s signpost to be unnerving, just as he found Peter Coffin’s name to be a strange foreboding of death. But the two go inside. Mrs. Hussey asks whether the two would like “cod” or “clam,” meaning cod or clam chowder, and the two men order both and eat their chowders with glee, as the soup is exceptionally delicious.
Even Ishmael, who purports to know something about marine culture, is confused by the two soup options, indicating that it is not only Queequeg who has trouble comprehending the customs and etiquette particular to the whaling town of Nantucket. Unlike Coffin, Mrs. Hussey takes a dimmer view of Queequeg’s “strange” activities in the room, as will be evidenced, later, by her unwillingness to let Queequeg continue in his “Ramadan,” or ritual fasting period, in the hotel room. Again Ishmael sees a name as foreboding, but with so many foreboding things can one really trust any of them?
Active
Themes
Literary Devices
Quiz
Test Yourself
After commenting that all the food, all the rooms, indeed even the milk in the Try Pots smells of fish—Nantucket being a fishing town—Ishmael goes with Queequeg upstairs to bed. Mrs. Hussey welcomes them to their room, saying only that she will take Queequeg’s harpoon from him, since once, at the same inn, a man was found dead, stabbed with his harpoon in the night. Ishmael and Queequeg fall quickly asleep.
