Small Peculiar

I like how Ishmael came out. He’s sporting what in the novel he refers to as a round jacket or a monkey jacket, which Civil War soldiers also wore—or would wear when the Civil War started, ten years after Moby-Dick was published. It was short, I assume so it wouldn’t get excessively befouled by whale fluids or caught up in the rigging, and it had two rows of buttons down the front. He seems like a blond to me, maybe because his name begins with a vowel and vowels to me feel blonder than consonants, maybe because race comes up a lot in the novel and it seemed fitting to emphasize his whiteness. “As though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.”