Moby Dick, The raft of the Medusa and Popeye

 

Moby Dick

I was reading Moby Dick. It took me awhile, and my life at the time became colored by the blues and whites of the novel. The idea was to do this project for the same period of time it took, to read the book. Towards the end of the novel, I realized that the task Melville undertook by writing Moby Dick, was the same as the novel quest for the whale- Moby Dick. This assumption made me happy.

The Raft of the Medusa

Gericault interviewed survivors of the 1816 shipwreck and built a scaled model of the raft. He went to morgues to do sketches of the dead. The painting took two years of work. Gericault died not too long after his odd expedition to this staged world of the dead.

Popeye

Moby Dick and the Raft of the Medusa connected in my head quite harmoniously: sea, the actual tragic stories and their fictional aftermath, but the Popeye? Popeye is someone between me- the author and me-the spectator who is transformed into Popeye character. He, me ,she , we make up a kind of  Greek Chorus.

 Greek Chorus-"the ideal spectator" that conveys to the actual spectator "a lyrical and musical expression of his own emotions, and elevates him to the region of contemplation." Some historians argue that the chorus was itself considered to be an actor. 

“I am what I am and that’s all that I am.”