/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14266534]

Is there a single better comedic character than moby dick's ishmael?

[Anonymous No.14266576]

>>14266534
Uncle Toby from Tristram Shandy
Also, why is Ishmael comic? Explain please

[Anonymous No.14266618]

>>14266534
I hate you faggots who try and make moby dick a comedy piece and reduce it to dick jokes because you can't into the sublime and can't appreciate anything unironically
Yes he has a sense of humour but no he is not one of the great comedic heroes

[Anonymous No.14266622]

>>14266618
Based.

[Anonymous No.14266623]

>>14266618
stfu coomer

[Anonymous No.14266634]

>>14266618
It is a comedy. It's not our fault that the genre has become tainted with will ferrell and retarded cinema and redditors that reduce all comedy into hedonistic pleasures devoid of intellectual merit. Shakespeare wrote comedies, so did Joyce and Melville. With the advancement of technology and the stupidity of the average Burger, the genre has been completely subverted and in turn, humorless.

[Anonymous No.14266662]

>>14266634
You have not explained how Moby-Dick is a comedy, though. It has comic moments (Queequeg at the beginning) but it has the structure of an obsessive encyclopaedia, the themes of Biblical literature and the language of Shakespearean tragedy. None of that is comic. Most of the book is not funny to me.

[Anonymous No.14266668]

>>14266634
Just because someone tells a few jokes and has a basic fucking personality doesn't make it a comedy. Yes, comedies can be great, yes, Will Ferrell is a faggot, no, Moby-Dick is not a comedy and even if it were Ishmael would not be among the greats.
How the fuck do you read the absolute majesty of Melville's passages and the enormity of the themes and think, nah actually, all this is just a really clever comment about his cock, lol
The only people who are stupid enough to degrade Moby Dick to the level of a comedy take enormous amounts of education to learn to create such stupid analyses and degrade any kind of greatness and Godliness in the western canon into something worthless because they can't understand or stomach the idea of an artist genuinely striving for the transcendent, so they seek to ruin it by calling it ironic.

[Anonymous No.14266669]

>>14266634
The technical definition of a comedy or tragedy, if your evoking Melville in connection with Shakespeare, is whether it ends with everything being wrapped up with an air of contentment for all or tragically. Do you think Moby Dick ends happily?

Historically irony and satire have very definitions from what we give them, as well.

[Anonymous No.14266705]

>>14266668
>>14266662
>>14266669
It's a comedy because the ending shows the absurdity of life. Yes, there are philosophically deep statements and ideas expressed, but comedies don't have to be sophomoric or juvenile in every scene.

[Anonymous No.14266709]

>>14266705
Oh so Macbeth is also a comedy then, right, thanks for that scintillating analysis champ

[Anonymous No.14266714]

>>14266705
you can call anything absurd then

[Anonymous No.14266718]

>>14266709
Yes, it is. So is Hamlet and Oedipus and King Lear
>>14266714
No you can't

[Anonymous No.14266723]

>>14266705

[Anonymous No.14266724]

>>14266718
why can't you?

[Anonymous No.14266742]

>>14266724
Because it requires a level of spirituality that transcends the material world and almost all contemporary works only focus on materialism and criticize a stoic or detached worldview because they are written by hedonists for philistines.

[Anonymous No.14266793]

>>14266634
>>14266705
>>14266718
Nice hot take, but you’ve found a defining feature of tragedies and claimed that it’s a feature of comedy. Tragedies use improbable misfortune and futile aims to create fear and pathos. If you really want to back up your claim and expand your analysis beyond a glib one-line and easily disprovable claim, then you need to do a lot more research on it. However, I think you would find it’s not possible to call Moby-Dick a comedy, not as its genre. And I don’t want to be rude with this but please finish high school and read more.

[Anonymous No.14266808]

>>14266742
that is absurd

[Anonymous No.14267063]

>>14266718
You must be 18 to post
This post is very underage brainlet tier

[Anonymous No.14267480]

>>14266534
Yeah, he is a comedic character in many ways. You might like this reading of M-D, lîstening to it allowed me to see more of the comedy in the book than I had before.
https://archive.org/details/moby_dick_librivox

[Anonymous No.14267500]

Some great comic moments in that very profound book.

[Anonymous No.14267509]

[Anonymous No.14267521]

>>14266534
Don Quixote de la Mancha

[Anonymous No.14268122]

>>14266534
Sancho Panza

[Anonymous No.14268521]

>>14266576
came to post this. also Apthorpe from The Sword of Honor.

[Anonymous No.14268776]

>>14266534
I got asked to recommend a funny book and I couldn't think of anything but Moby Dick, I wasn't understood

[Anonymous No.14269022]

>>14268776
Catch 22

[Anonymous No.14269761]

>>14266576
fpbp

[Anonymous No.14269897]

A comic foil can make tragedy even more profound. The Fool in King Lear, Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet as insult comedian. Like Ishmael, these characters start to recede as the bodies pile up.

[Anonymous No.14271004]

[Anonymous No.14271426]

me