A Day in the Life and Vice Versa
The Typee are described as uniform and their lack of diversity is given a sense of outwardly glorious though ultimately ironic perfection. Nothing changes and nothing varies. Rather than situation this entirely within the negative, however, Melville spins it:”
"with these unsophisicated savages the history of a day is the history of a life”
The Pork of Joy
A staple of the Typee diet is pig and the manner in which the author conveys the richness of its preparation takes it beyond the level of metaphor and into the realm of poetry:
“Such is the summary style in which the Typees convert perverse-minded and rebellious hogs into the most docile and amiable pork; a morsel of which placed on the tongue melts like a soft smile from the lips of Beauty.”
The Very Bad Night
The narrator is a man with a past; an exciting adventurer whose life has been one long trek from high to low points. As such, when a man like this singles out a single night for particular mention as horrid, it may be worth reading on to discover why. He is not the type to casually slip into such metaphorical derangement:
“I have had many a ducking in the course of my life, and in general cared little about it; but the accumulated horrors of that night, the deathlike coldness of the place, the appalling darkness and the dismal sense of our forlorn condition, almost unmanned me.”
The Hippocrates of the South Seas
The narrator provides an extensive physical description of an old healer whom he compares to the Father of Mecicine, Hippocrates, not least due to the gravity of his visage:
“His head was as bald as the polished surface of a cocoanut shell, which article it precisely resembled in smoothness and colour, while a long silvery beard swept almost to his girdle of bark.”
A Metaphorical Anti-Capitalist Utopia
It seems less a case of mere coincidence than something much different when one realizes the entire life-span of Herman Melville and Karl Marx almost perfectly overlap. Born about a year apart, the bulk of their most robust intellectual existence parallels the other and as a result, it becomes less and less surprising the more one comes across anti-capitalist sentiments which are sprinkled liberally throughout Melville’s body of work. In Typee, in fact, the island almost verges on becoming described as a utopian idea of rejected capitalist ideology:
“There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers perversely bent on being paid”
