His early life has already featured, in the "Sketch," many incidents of wandering away from home and of rebellion against the restrictions and injustices of society.
In 1842, two years after publishing Two Years before the Mast, Dana began to compose "An Autobiographical Sketch, 1815–1841." This "Sketch" (1968) creates a context for the previously published work that justifies the first of the two interpretations. They coexist in a tension that is sometimes also resolved. Yet the two phases are not after all so neatly opposed and divided between two halves of the story. With respect to the motif of literacy, the initial effort to live fully amid the bracing energies of winds and sea gives way to an appreciation of the curative force of reading and writing books. Dana indeed desires first to become entirely the sailor but then in terror before that eventuality desires to return to his identity as a Harvard scholar. The two possibilities may relate to the Goethean-Carlylean pattern of Bildung, whereby the protagonist initially rebels and escapes from home but later repents and returns, recognizing that his America must be "here or nowhere" (Carlyle 1899, 156), 1 in Massachusetts rather than in California. But an opposite possibility is that the ship resembles an unhealthy prison and the foreign settings are spoiled, and so hope resides in the curative power still emanating from the civilization of home.
As one possibility, contagious sickness and forms of bondage characterize the culture of home, whereas the sailor's condition and less civilized sites offer health, romance, and freedom.
In narrating his voyage out from Boston on the Pilgrim and his voyage home on the Alert, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., encourages an ambivalent interpretation of the experience.
0 kommentar(er)
