Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Themes

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea represents a world in the midst of heady scientific discoveries and innovations. The central piece of technology through which this change is explored is Captain Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus, which allows him to spend his life permanently roaming the oceans. The novel illustrates the new and exciting opportunities made possible by scientific discovery and innovation. Told from the point of view of a naturalist, Professor Pierre Arronax…

One of the more abstract philosophical questions explored in the novel regards the meaning of freedom. By depicting a protagonist and two other central characters who are captured as “prisoners of war” and confined to an underwater submarine totally cut off from society, the novel interrogates the importance of freedom while postulating that in almost all situations, freedom necessarily has limits. One of the central ways in which the tension between freedom and constraint emerges…

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea takes place during the peak of the age of imperialism, at a time when global colonial exploration was drawing to a close and most of the world had been “conquered” by imperial powers. Several characters in the novel—including Nemo and Arronax—want to travel and conquer the world, including the mysterious, unexplored depths of the deep sea. Indeed, in a moment in which most of the land has already…

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea depicts a man—Captain Nemo—who chooses to exile himself from human society and spend the rest of his life exploring the ocean, having minimal contact with other people. When he captures three men from another ship, the Abraham Lincoln, he welcomes them on board his submarine, the Nautilus, and asserts that they may never return to civilization again. While this is clearly an extreme fate, the…