Typee Analysis

Everyone Always Wants To Be FirstThe first human inhabitants of Aka and Pepe-iu were not indigenous, but actually explorers from Hawaii that settled there. Of course, they got there prior to 100 CE...

There are two Tommos, or rather, one Tom and one Tommo. It is Tom, a highly-intelligent ethnographer and storyteller who offers the novel, but it is poor, injured Tommo the escaped sailor who exper...

Want an adventure? Well Typee is it. With cannibal threats, soaring spears, bathing beauties, and dramatic landscapes, this book has everything you need. There is an inexact threat of danger around...

There's the neat trick of twinning here (mentioned also in our "Narrative Technique" section), where we experience a slice of the character-Tommo's adventure, filtered through narrator-Tommo's comp...

It isn't just Tommo's tone that changes as he moves his readers from in-scene stories to reportage (more factual-sounding accounts), and back. It's also how Melville manipulates his vocabulary tha...

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is pretty playful for the story of a sailor who's held captive for four months. So what's Melville getting at? Perhaps it's that, as long as four months can seem fo...

The final chapter of the book, as it's been published since the mid-nineteenth century, is "The Story of Toby," an account of what happened to Toby after he leaves the Typee Valley in an attempt to...

There are two major factors that up the difficulty on this otherwise straightforward literary adventure tale. The first one is diction. It isn't that Melville simply uses big words—it's that he w...

Jailbreak on the High SeasOkay, so our hero-narrator Tommo is bored, and on a ship in the middle of the ocean. "Oh! for a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—" Tommo gasps, "for a snuff at t...

After Tommo and Toby escape their ship into the mountains of the Marquesas and have a bit of trouble, they seek refuge and food in a native village of friendly people. The Typee, to Tommo, are a st...

Tommo decides to flee his whaling ship when it lands at the French Polynesian islands, the Marquesas. He and his fellow sailor Toby make for the mountains, but they get more than they bargained fo...

"The greatest, grandest things are unpredicted," scrawled Melville in the margins of his copy of John Milton's Paradise Regained. It's no surprise that this notion came from the same mind that brou...

Though there's for sure a lot of nudity, and one mention of some risky business between more than two people in the bushes, this book is largely chaste when it comes to the topic of sex. It doesn't...

Apollo (18.20)Bluebeard (27.15)Coan, D. T. (Intro.7)da Figueroa, Christoval Suaverde, History of Mendanna's Voyage (25.13)Dana, Richard Henry, Two Years Before the Mast (Intro.6)Dalrymple, Alexande...