HIGHLY SUSPICOUS MOBY-DICK MOMENTS !! or: classic lit out of context
PART ONE: (where the whole ishmael x queequeg sequence is Just Like That and the gay subtext was just the Text itself, what should i call the ship? Ishqueg? Queemael?)
He grabbed me by the waist, and said that henceforth we were married
”Spread yourselves,” cried Ahab
Got it, Pip! Bang it, bellboy! Rig it, dig, it, stig it, quig it, bellboy! Make fireflies; break the jinglers!” ”Jinglers, you say? - there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so”
“But avast,” he added, tapping his forehead, “you haint no objections to sharing a harpooneer’s blanket, have ye? I s’pose you are goin’ a-whalin’, so you’d better get used to that sort of thing.”
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.
“Landlord! I’ve changed my mind about that harpooneer.—I shan’t sleep with him.”
… and seeing no possible chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person’s bed, I began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I’ll wait awhile; he must be dropping in before long. I’ll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may become jolly good bedfellows after all—there’s no telling.
and I don’t see what on airth keeps him so late, unless, may be, he can’t sell his head
this man sleepe you—you sabbee?”
“Me sabbee plenty”—grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and sitting up in bed. “You gettee in,” he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. - - -by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me. -- - My sensations were strange.
I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
At first he little noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last night’s hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a little complimented.
we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.