i
- The narrator is in a museum looking at Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream. In it, he sees his character Achille and the recognition energizes him.
- He reflects on the columns (i.e., in the museum, in southern American and Greek Architecture—the culture of enslavement) and how they constantly surround Achille and his own craft.
ii
- The narrator is made to feel the difference of his skin color in New England when the white people around him react fearfully to his presence.
iii
- He is once again on a New England beach at the cold end of summer when he meets the ghost of his father (if you're counting, this is the second encounter).
- At first, the narrator rejects the encounter—it's too darn cold out for a chat.
- He muses on the strange fact that his father—who died as a young man—could be his child now. In other words, he is older than his father ever lived to be.
- His father tells him that he needs to travel to those places that he read about in The World's Classics when he was a young man.
- Only then, his ghost-father says, will he be able to speak of his island properly.
- He likens his son to the sea-swift, who flies its journeys in a circular pattern. Go figure.