First Things First…
For the first time in a while since I started reviewing Poe’s stories, I’ve reached one that I’ve heard of. I hope that bodes well, since by and large what I’ve read of his earlier stuff has disappointed me. Then again, I still wouldn’t call this one of his most famous works. I have no idea what it’s about, but hopefully it’s the start of an upswing in my enjoyment of his catalogue.
3 Things I Like
3. Just Me and the Old Swede
There are two ships in the story, and before the narrator is hurled onto the second—which I’ll get to shortly—he has a rough go of it on the first.
A monster storm hurls overboard and most likely kills all but two people on the first ship—the narrator and an old Swede. They’re stuck there for nearly a week, unable to properly run the ship and basically awaiting their doom as they continue to travel south.
This section of the story includes some of Poe’s signature eerie descriptions, like this…
“Eternal night continued to envelop us… We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder.”
2. Down the Whirlpool
The story ends abruptly, which I found jarring at first. But it’s because the narrator is still writing his manuscript, or journal, as he and his shipmates perish. It’s essentially a real-time account of the end of the ship.
1. Ghost Ship?
I’m not entirely sure how to describe or even think about the second ship—the one that goes down in the end. I felt like I must be missing something, and that the Wikipedia summary would set me straight, but it’s still not completely clear.
When the narrator first ends up on this ship, he immediately hides from the crew. But little by little, he gets more brazen in putting himself in front of them on the deck. At one point, he says, “Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see.” Nobody talks to him or even looks at him. Eventually, he comes face to face with the captain in the captain’s quarters, and yet he’s still ignored.
He also writes about how old everyone on the ship is, saying…
“… they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shriveled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest.”
Even the nautical instruments on board are ancient and obsolete.
Sooooo… ghosts?
Is this a ghost story? Is the narrator a ghost? Is it a ghost ship? I still don’t know exactly how it makes sense, but it’s a fun explanation.
1 Thing I’m Mixed On
1. Who Finds the Bottle?
I was a few pages into the story before I realized that what I was reading is the manuscript. I thought, at first, that the narrator was the person who found the bottle with the manuscript inside, and that he was introducing himself before recounting the story he found.
I don’t know that that would make the story any better. It just strikes me as a little weird that the story is structured as a man in a bizarre situation writing his story down and sticking it in a bottle so someone, somewhere, sometime will find it and read it, yet the actual finding of it never plays into things.
Are we as readers supposed to be stand-ins for someone finding the bottle?
1 Thing I Don’t Like
1. “Discovery”
The narrator describes a scene on the “ghost ship” in which he ventured onto the deck without attracting notice and threw himself down into a pile of old sails. In doing so, he accidentally daubed a tar brush all over a folded sail. Well, his accidental strokes of the brush spelled out the word “DISCOVERY” when the sail was unfolded.
I assume there’s meant to be some meaning to this, but this journey isn’t about discovery, as far as I can tell. It’s about death.
Tim Matassa
