Typee Themes

As we discussed in "Characterization" and "Style," the role of language crops up all over this tale. That should come as no great shock. Two American sailors (one with a bit of Polynesian vocab tuc...

Sure, Toby might be the obvious BFF, but he's not the only close companion to have a part in Typee. While Tommo's busy building relationships with Toby, Kory-Kory, Mehevi, and Fayaway, he also obse...

Courage doesn't come easy. Just ask Mow-Mow. With his beat-up, one-eyed face, he really gets punished for acting on the convictions of his beliefs. Other characters, however, seem to be able to fig...

You could argue that most of the mean or ignorant statements that the characters have to share seem at first to have to do with race. But to stop at that would be to simplify something that's a lot...

Some people might argue that there are no female characters in Typee. We'd let them have that opinion—it's certainly up for an interesting debate. There's Fayaway, of course, applauded by Tommo f...

For Tommo, the religion of the Typee is by turns silly and scary. There's that cannibalism business (reserved, by the way, for defeated enemies and not just because they're hungry). But then there'...

As Tommo tells the story of his journey into the interior of the Marquesan forest, he can't stop using hyperbole and exclamation to describe his surroundings and his experience with the Typee. Of...

Melville, veteran sailor, never plays around when it comes to examining power and power structures. On a civilian ship, just like in the military, who has power and who doesn't is a painfully obvio...

If this story is about a man's quest for freedom, it isn't a story about freedom for everybody. Sure, the main narrative thread is how Tommo, imprisoned on a boat, escapes to find freedom, and ends...