Meaning of Queequeg | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A fictional sidekick character in American author Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick, the multiracial tattooed Polynesian cannibal prince and skilled harpooner who became a whaler on European vessels out of wanderlust. Queequeg practices an alien fictional religion and constantly engages in feats of bravado intimidating to the white and ethnically-European protagonist but befriends him and shows no resentment at treatment by white societies. Melville's text describes him as “George Washington cannibalistically developed”.
2. A person, fictional character, or other foil who literally or symbolically fulfills one or more of the roles Queequeg played in Moby-Dick such as the noble savage, Entwicklungsroman guru or exemplar, or racially-inflected spear carrier role.

Examples

“Half British and half Aboriginal, Bony is in his early to middle forties. Like Herman Melville's Queequeg before him, Bony benefits from his mixture of races.”

“As they stroll out together they evoke stares, not because of Queequeg's outlandish tattooing (since New Bedford's whaling port draws a worldwide sailor population), but because of the easy companionship of a dark-skinned man with a white. Melville seems to raise the question, What might America have become if the European encounter with the wilderness had been directed by truly humane, universal values?”

“This type of programme envisaged might do something towards combating the 'Queequeg Syndrome', which is an induced psychiatric illness, due to the patient being treated as abnormal. The cause is similar to that of institutional neurosis, but it affects patients outside hospital and is due to the attitudes of family, general practitioner, community workers and society. The patient is now expected to be more normal than normal.”

“After that I was regarded as comic. I became a ‘coconut’—someone brown on the outside, white on the inside. I was the bleached academic—more white than the anglo professors. In my classes several students glared at me, clearly seeing in me the person they feared ever becoming. Who was I, after all, but some comic Queequeg, holding close to my breast a reliquary containing the white powder of a dead European civilization?”

“For Ishmael, unparented and self-abhoring, accession requires that he find, then lose himself in a Queequeg, preparatory to finding, then losing himself in an Ahab, both of whom he will, at the end of the adventure, kill.”

CEFR level